

SEEN FROMo^ 
croTHE SADDLE 



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IsA Carringtok Cabell 





LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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SlielfA..!.i5...S4 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




" IN THE SADDLE " 






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SEEN FROM THE SADDLE 



BY 



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ISA CARRINGTON CABELL 



WITH INTRODUCTION BY 

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 




NEW YORK SVS^^ ^ 
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1893 



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^^^^ 



C^Y-jL. X . 









OTHER VOLUMES IN 



Harper's ''Black and White'' Series. 

Illustrated. 32mo, Cloth, 50 cents each. 



A FAMILY CANOE TRIP. By FLORENCE WATTERS 
Snedeker. 

A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN. By WILLIAM DEAN 

Howells. 
A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION. A Farce. By WILLIAM 

Dean howells. 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. An Address. By GEORGE 

WILLIAM Curtis. 

IN THE VESTIBULE LIMITED. By BRANDER MAT- 
THEWS. 

THE ALBANY DEPOT. A Farce. By WILLIAM DEAN 
HOWELLS. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

For sale by all booksellers^ or ivill be sent by the publishers^ 
postage prepaid, on receipt of price. 



Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reservea. 



TO 

S. L. W. 



INTRODUCTION 

It is one of our modern notions that almost 
everything in life depends upon our point of view, 
and the artists of the pen and the brush are wan- 
dering round in search nf the proper point. Our 
ancestors, not many generations ago, used to see 
the world mainly from the saddle, and it cannot 
be doubted that their view of it was virile, and, 
on the whole, cheerful. We know, as a matter 
of fact, that the world is instantly changed when 
one mounts a horse. The rider is in a state to 
make an image of it different from that formed 
by the footpad, or the traveller by rail. Perhaps 
he shares the spirit of the horse, perhaps his ela- 
tion is due to his slight elevation above the earth, 
perhaps he is affected by the uncertainty which 
imparts an air of adventure to the shortest excur- 
sion, that is so free to bend to the least whim of 
the rider or the horse. At any rate, he rides 
away into a novel world, either in the freshness of 
a spring morning or the poetic light of a summer 
evening, when the apple - trees are in blossom or 



the corn is hanging out its silken tassels, and the 
most familiar roads and by-ways are created 
anew for him. It happens, also, that the fatigue 
of the exercise does not extend to the brain as it 
does in walking, and the point of view of the rider 
is apt to be wholesome and hopeful. 

What the world is seen from the top of a bi- 
cycle we have yet to learn, for the riders of those 
wheels of modern progress are too much occupied 
by their own equilibrium and appearance and 
speed to pay much attention to the sentiments 
that Nature suggests to her loving observers. In 
these witty and sympathetic studies of a New 
England summer we return again to the compan- 
ionship of a very noble animal, with whom is con- 
nected whatever is most romantic in the history 
of our race, and who has been the sharer and in- 
spirer of much of our noblest poetry and achieve- 
ment. Perhaps when steam and electricity have 
entirely relieved him of the degradation of ignoble 
labors, he may become exclusively the comrade 
of our hours of ease and pleasure, and young 
women and young men will find health in his 
society, and learn that on his back they can any 
hour ride away from habits of morbid introspec- 
tion into a cheerful world. 

C. D.W. 




SEEN FROM THE SADDLE 



^OLLY the mare has been trained 
by a girl. The girl is at college 
building on her high -school 
foundation, and has probably 
got over all the freakish fem- 
inine ways she taught Dolly, and sobered 
down into a disciplined character. A disci- 
plined character is produced by a college 
education. But Dolly has not left off a 
single womanish wile since her mistress bade 
her good-bye last September. She has a little 
brown head which she twists and turns as if 
she were looking in a mirror, and she thinks 
it clever to prance and caper when she is 
mounted. When she hears a step behind 
her, like the girl in Mrs. Browning's pretty 
poem, she pricks up her ears and runs. 



Gretchen, Dolly's mistress, has a friend 
who teaches in a horse kindergarten, and 
he says if he had had the educating of the 
mare this would be a very different story. 
His colts get up to an early breakfast, take 
a warm bath before eating it, and then ex- 
ercise according to the best hygienic meth- 
ods. Not the sound of a whip or a cross 
word is heard in all the great stock farm, 
where hundreds of horses are reared ; but 
when one of them is disobedient or frisky, 
the trainer takes him up to the printed rules 
that are pasted on the stable wall and bids 
him look at them. That one action, full of 
dignified sorrow, breaks the colt's heart. 
He turns away crimson with mortification, 
and never jumps or runs out of time again. 
But Dolly cannot read. Teach her.^ It is 
too late. You must teach a colt to read the 
hour it is born. If you begin later it is a 
useless task. When, then, are we to start 
with our children ? Start ? Have we not 
been told to begin by educating their an- 
cestors, and are not their ancestors hard at 
it in literature classes and language classes 
and whist classes, for the sake of posterity? 
Dolly and the bay and their riders started 



out the other morning with a gayety of 
spirit and a youthfulness of body they have 
learned to know do not come with a good 
conscience but by living under a friendly 
sky. They were just as good and almost 
as young during all that terrible rainy spell 
last week, and they felt old and wretched. 
And there are philosophers who tell us we 
are responsible for our mental and moral 
attitudes ! The wind was blowing, but it 
blew as if it loved them, and the sunshine 
showered down softly through delicate green 
leaves. In the tender blue depths above the 
crows were sailing lazily ; their ''caws," 
"caws" were the discord needed to com- 
plete the harmony of the bird songs. Peo- 
ple who play or listen to Bach will under- 
stand. 

They started down Farmington Avenue 
at a brisk trot. There were two young 
ladies on bicycles who turned out for them 
and gave them the courtesy of the road. 
One looked very pretty in her blue habit 
and little gold-braided cap; and she had 
got some distance up the avenue before 
Dolly's rider recognized her as the little 
school-teacher with the pale face and the 



black gown and straw hat all too big for her, 
who goes down-town in the 8.30 tram. 

''Dear! dear!" Dolly's rider exclaimed; 
"I wish her young man could see her now!'* 

''Whose young man? How do you know 
she's got a young man ? If she has, how 
do you know it would be best for either 
of them ? Besides, a woman who rides on 
a bicycle is emancipated and does not want 
a young man. She is pledged to her work 
and her ambition. She would not resign it 
to be a cook or a seamstress without wages." 
This from D., who rides the bay. Dolly's 
rider perceived that he had been reading 
the Arena, and was talking with the zeal of 
a person to whom this question is novel 
and interesting; she therefore humored him. 

" Maybe her young man," she said, " is 
willing to relinquish everything for the love 
of the schoolma'am, in order to attain to the 
sphere of a husband and father, the only 
true and real life for any noble man." This 
sentiment had such a familiar sound and 
such a reasonable sound that they had turn- 
ed into Sisson Avenue before D. realized 
the neat turn of the tables. How many 
thousand times he had heard it with com- 



placency with "wife and mother" substi- 
tuted for "husband and father." 

" I am going to Parkville," he said. *' I 
am interested in the growth of the city ;'* 
but both knew that going to Parkville was 
Dolly's doing, not theirs. While they were 
talking about spheres, she took her head. 
They trotted down a long, shadeless street ; 
the sun shone hot, there was a brick house 
at the end of the lane with " cool lager- 
beer " lettered on the outside ; little ambi- 
tious houses are scattered about between 
grocery stores ; one has a tiled fagade, or 
rather the whole side of the suburban villa 
is thus decorated, and other houses are 
painted in glowing colors, all yellow or all 
red, or shingled in all the hues of the rain- 
bow. Having once said he wanted to see 
Parkville, D. stuck to it. He does not read 
his Emerson enough to know that consist- 
ency is the hobgoblin of a small mind, but 
a sudden flash of memory lighted the little 
suburb with a vivid interest. " D.," said 
Dolly's rider, " Patrick lives in Parkville." 
Now, Patrick is the hired man, and they see 
his slim, loose-jointed figure every day and 
regard it with no great curiosity ; but that 



he dwelt in one of those neat little houses 
invested the whole place with a human 
interest. 

" He lives in a white house with a porch, 
and he had his picture taken sitting on it ; 
his little girl was in the yard and his wife 
at the well." This Dolly's rider repeated 
eagerly, and for some time they went about 
looking for the white house and the porch 
and the little girl and the woman at the 
well, and Patrick, the presiding divinity, 
but they did not find them. After they 
got on the middle Farmington Road, D. 
suggested that the people had probably 
gone into the house since the picture was 
taken last summer, but the remark came too 
late to destroy the interest in Parkville. 

You know the middle road to Farming- 
ton, up hill and down, with farms lying on 
either side: the young grain rows checkered 
the brown fields, the maples cast long shad- 
ows upon the sloping knolls, and beyond 
the acres of greensward and sunshine were 
bounded by the tenderer green of the for- 
est. Almost all the way is shaded by elm 
or maple trees some pious soul, on whom 
be peace, planted for the comfort of the 



wayfarer ; the houses are set up close to 
the road, with green untrodden yards that 
lead to small white doors, for there are no 
paths from the front door to the street or 
road ; people go in from the side entrance 
or at the back, and these riders had a feel- 
ing that these closed doors opened into the 
best room, that dark and gloomy abode of 
respectability. So uniform is this custom 
of shutting up the front of the house, that 
when they passed a large white house with 
the grass all trodden down, as if with the 
tramp of heavy boots, between the low white 
porch and the gate, and they saw that all 
the windows were up in the front room, 
they did not need Dolly's quickened pace 
and little startled shy to tell them what had 
happened. Was he glad to quit the narrow 
bounds of a New England countryside for 
the great world of mystery in which for so 
many sordid years his speculative mind had 
dwelt — the master of the house who had 
been carried thence but yesterday ? It did 
not seem an uncheerful place to live in, that 
sunshiny day ; all the crop was growing in 
even rows, and the wide barn doors were 
open as if they expected the hay to be 



brought in ; the tall green oats waved in 
the fields under the breath of the soft wind ; 
there was a fragrance of wild honeysuckles 
and clover, and in front of the door, almost 
overshadowing it, grew a great apple-tree, 
white with blooms, and the meadow was 
canopied with their wide-spreading branch- 
es. There is something in the perfume and 
the color of certain flowers or trees that 
affects the character of the people of the 
country they grow in. The land of the 
orange flower and the olive is the land of 
song, of indolence, of music, of sensuous 
ease. Even the habitant of a climate like 
England falls under the spell, and in a grove 
of orange-trees is impelled to write "Childe 
Harold " or *' Don Juan." The apple-tree is 
like the New England character ; there are 
the gnarled trunks, the deep ruts, the pale, 
pure blossoms, with pink - veined hearts, 
shedding pure fragrance. Did anybody ever 
write a poem of passion under an apple- 
tree ? Only the look at it and the scent of 
it is a reproof to passion, and a call to con- 
viction. It is not sensuous, it is not even 
dreamy or indolent. It is penetrating, spicy 
almost, and delicate with the shy sweetness 



of the New England heart. Yes, it was a 
pity to have to leave the world while the 
apple-trees were blossoming. 

" We are sure of a good crop of apples ? 
We are certainly safe from frost?" The 
hired man who was ploughing by the fence 
shook his head. 

" I don't know as it's safe till June," 
he said; ''and I don't know as it's safe 
then." 

*' Think of the man who lived here, D.," 
said Dolly's rider. ** Six months in the year 
with the road that leads to the world all 
buried in the snow, and all the hill -side 
white with snow, and the wind whistling 
around the house, and he crouched there 
before the fire, the cold chilling his bones. 
I've been thinking why all the cults and 
isms are born in New England. For all 
those months people have nothing to do 
but to sit by the fire and dream, and specu- 
late and evolve queer fancies out of their 
brains. Who ever heard of a social reform 
in this country south of Baltimore ; was a 
new community, or an 'outcomer,' ever in- 
digenous to a hot climate.^ It's the same 
in Europe; there are no nihilists in Italy; 



it takes the cold of Russia to generate 
them." 

'' There are insurrections in Chile," said 
D., who reads the newspapers. 

" Oh, but an insurrection is a passion not 
a plan, and it is generally a revolt against 
physical not spiritual nor intellectual op- 
pression." 

But Dolly started to run, and the conver- 
sation took a turn. She ran up a hill and 
down to a little stream where clear sweet 
water splashes over queer-looking gold col- 
ored sands. There is a big elm at the deep 
part where the horses stop to drink, and 
two orioles celebrated their coming, or the 
day, by sitting on the fence and singing, 
first a solo and then a duet ; the notes fell 
like glittering drops of silver into the glid- 
ing stream below. A slender white rose- 
bush was growing up against the fence, not 
climbing, but swaying towards it as if for 
protection, with the graces of youth and an 
inexpressible charm of beauty. It made the 
horseback people think of a young girl in 
her father's house. It was a cheerful ride, 
the very fields looked busy with their early 
summer growth. They hurried along be- 



tween the silver willows and rustling alders, 
and they looked across the meadows, where 
the cattle stood in clover, to the blue heights 
of the Talcott range. A little plantation of 
soft maples had just put out their blooms. 
If a painter had painted it, not Mr. Brad- 
ford Torrey himself could have told whether 
it was an autumn or a spring scene, for all 
the blossoms were a brilliant red, and droop- 
ing over an old stone house that was half- 
covered with a red vine, looked more like 
October's signal of warning than May's flag. 
They stopped at a white house on the hill- 
side to get water. An old man drew it for 
them from the well. He was a lean old man, 
and he had a quid of tobacco in his cheek ; 
but he was glad to see them, and he offered 
to go in the house for a glass, speaking de- 
preciatingly of the tin dipper which these 
city people greatly preferred. 

" T guess," he said, with a pleased chuckle, 
" you don't get no such water in Hartford ; 
they say it's terrible bad there." Did the 
draught from the clear cool well taste the 
sweeter for the thought that for all their town 
meetings and their church privileges the city 
had nothing half so good to drink ? Dolly's 



rider and D. could afford to be more gener- 
ous. There was a portly female form at 
the window — a narrow window, shaded by 
white curtains. '' She's good to him, D.,"said 
Dolly's rider. ''He's all stained up with 
chewing tobacco, so she must let him do as 
he likes." 

But the cheerfulest of rides cannot go on 
forever without something that if not ex- 
actly pathetic suggests melancholy. There 
had been a high wind the night before, and 
on the road coming home they saw a great 
willow split in two, and one half, laden with 
spring leaves, lay prone on the ground. The 
heart of the tree, black and crumbling as if 
smitten by lightning, was bared to the piti- 
less sunshine. 

*' That's what it got for trying to be 
young," said D., grimly. '* It bore the cold 
of winter, the heavy snow, the icy blast, and 
spread its wide branches skyward, vigorous 
and strong. If it had been content to put 
out a few elderly sprouts to show it was 
alive, we could never have seen that rotten 
heart. It was the weight of the young 
spring leaves that broke it down, not the 
wind or the weather, but all its vitality went 



out to support them. And in return they 
sapped its life. Its pride and its beauty were 
its destruction. Ah, well-a-day !" 

" Like old Mr. B. after his wife died. 
Don't you remember the spruce gait and 
the new clothes and the frisky airs — and 
then, poor old dear — the paralytic stroke .^" 
said Dolly's rider. 

But D. protested. *' Don't vulgarize my 
simile by applying it ; that's the fatal prac- 
ticality which is the death of art. A woman 
cannot be a great artist because she always 
wants to utilize things. I never saw one of 
your sex who could let a flower go on bloom- 
ing in a secluded spot. She must gather it, 
impelled by a queer morality that it would 
be selfish to waste it on the wind and the 
leaves and the grass it was created for. If 
she hears a bird sing, she must try to cage 
it. When you do get your rights good-bye 
to romance. We'll all be en evidence, every 
mine worked to its final yield. You'd ban- 
ish the dead languages from the colleges as 
of no commercial value, and manufacture 
sonnets for the occasion as Mr. Brander 
Matthews is teaching the Columbia boys 
to do." 



14 



" You shall not say we are not romantic ; 
we can get married and still make heroes of 
our husbands — if that does not imply the 
highest imaginative faculty, well, I'd want 
to know !" retorted Dolly's rider, and then 
she gave the mare the least little possible 
touch of the whip, and the theorist was left 
far behind, as with the wind in their faces 
they flew down the shady lanes and by the 
open-mouthed school-children and the man 
shut up in the red milk-cart and the tram 
and the jolly red - faced conductor, who 
touched his cap in a burst of sympathy. 
But when they got home Dolly's rider had 
to sit perched upon the saddle till some 
male person came to take her down. 

There's a moral in this situation. 



II 




HEY set out for Bloomfield, but 
there are as many ways of going 
there as there are ways to go to 
Rome, especially if it does not 
really greatly matter whether 
you get there or not ; but one has already 
taken a step towards making a ride interest- 
ing, if one has fixed on a destination — not but 
that there are people who like indefiniteness, 
who like to set out of a June morning with 
the world before them, and D. is one of this 
kind. If he had his way he would ride straight 
out of his own farm-yard into the bank of blue 
clouds that strives to bound his horizon; 
he could follow a lane that has no turning, 
lose himself in a forest of Arden. But Dol- 
ly's rider is another sort. D. says, *' We'll 
go somewhere," meaning nowhere. Dolly's 
rider agrees to the somewhere and thinks of 
Bloomfield. The vagueness which makes the 
charm of his wanderings gives her the sensa- 
tion of being adrift and rudderless, but it is a 



pathetic quality of the female mind that it 
has learned through necessity to reverse nat- 
ure. Dolly's rider with the strongest inclina- 
tion to definiteness gratifies it by a ruse. She 
makes believe she is going to do a thing, and 
by the exercise of imagination, a faculty D. 
denies her, gets the poor comfort of being self- 
deceived. It was this way, therefore, they 
set out for Bloomfield, turning sharply out 
of Forest Street into Hawthorne Street, 
crossing the railroad bridge and riding to the 
open, where they turned and went up the hill 
towards Trinity and by Zion Hill Cemetery. 

That was several days ago, and the cold 
had held so much of spring in its closed fin- 
gers that the leaves had not burst into 
full foliage, and looking across the meadows 
they had their last view for the season of 
an unobstructed expanse; the limbs of the 
trees still defined against the horizon, and 
stretching their lengths against the sky. 

*' Let me have one more look at a free 
country ; I don't like to peep out at the 
world from beneath a leafy canopy," said D., 
who by this time has no doubt revealed his 
very contradictory character, for he hates 
spring and he loves summer, yet he waxes 



I? 



even sentimental over the first tender green 
of the leaves, a feeling in which Dolly's pro- 
saic rider shares. Just as there are flowers 
whose odor is a key to closed doors of 
memory, so this first green of spring smites 
certain hearts. There is something in its 
tenderness, its freshness, a sense of the be- 
ginning of life in its soft youthfulness, that 
stirs the soul and wakes the immortal long- 
ing, that so long a time has slumbered, to 
bathe ourselves again in innocency. 

The wood which slopes from the top of 
the hill to the river is a sweet and sylvan 
spot which, as neither of the horseback 
riders expects to sell it for city lots, I vent- 
ure to say is far from the haunts of fashion 
and the bustle of traffic. From this green 
pinnacle they saw the river's curve and the 
willows that fringe its banks, and thought 
the turrets of the red houses made Hart- 
ford, from a distance, look like Rothenburg. 
There are chestnuts and beeches in the 
lower grove, and ferns and wind-flowers grow 
luxuriantly in the green depths, but only a 
few great oaks shade the upper part, and a 
field of buttercups shimmers in the morn- 
ing's shine from the slope of the hill to the 



x8 



meadow beyond. I wonder why we cannot 
grow sentimental over yellow flowers — why 
the color of yellow is, in fact, inimical to 
sentiment. Gold has its poetical uses — 
gates of gold, streets of gold, golden harps, 
girls, lads, hearts, but the element of pathos 
is wanting. When the sun sets it sets as 
often in yellow as in purple clouds, but 
substitute yellow for purple in Whittier's 
" Psalm," 

"Till care and trial seem at last 
Though memory's sunset air, 
Like mountain ranges over past 
In yellow distance fair." 

You have the idea, but you have spoiled 
the poem. D. and Dolly's rider saw a field 
of clover with the wind blowing over it one 
afternoon in Sicily, last spring, and as the 
bells bowed to the breeze and all that deli- 
cious, undulating, pink meadow waved be- 
fore them, its beauty smote their hearts with 
a pleasure so keen that it was almost pain, 
but they saw the charming sight of this 
field of buttercups bathed in sunshine with 
dry eyes. 

They didn't see the grass that stretches 



19 



from field to field with unhindered growth 
in such a spirit of cheerful indifference. As 
the breeze blew over it it might have been 
a long succession of billows, while the gray- 
blooms looked like the crests of the waves, 
and the clover field beyond became easily 
the depths of the farther ocean. Dolly's 
rider even said the birds that flew over it or 
dipped into the spray were sea-birds. 

*' Nay, rather, comrade, let them be 
Like skylarks bold, for they, said he, 
Fly straight to heaven." 

D. quoted from the Provengal poem. " The 
grass need not seem like anything else than 
itself to please and charm me. It has the 
natural waving line of beauty, it is so soft, 
so silent, so restful to look at, and one has a 
sort of sentiment about it when one remem- 
bers that what we have had all our lives 
beneath our feet will one day lie above us, 
while the proof that we are not forgotten 
will be in its tender green." They were pass- 
ing Zion Hill Cemetery, and the cared-for 
graves suggested these thoughts, w^hich, af- 
ter all, were not sad but rather of a pleasing 
melancholy. 



"When it comes to birds," said Dolly's 
rider, trotting briskly down the hill into the 
sunshine, ''you'd better look out for what 
names you give them. I was talking about 
hearing orioles sing the other day, and some- 
body insisted orioles never sang from the 
loth of May till the 15th of August. They 
keep a little red note-book — no, no, that was 
unintentional — that they may never forget 
the date, and that ignorant people may not 
confound them with bobolinks, who are quite 
a different family." 

" Do you know," said D., severely, " what 
all these scrappy little bits of information 
they gather from all sorts of unreliable 
sources do for people.^ There is one 1 
could name who used to be like a glass of 
pure water, flavorless, it is true, but a clear, 
sweet draught. But somebody came along 
and put in a little claret, and another a lit- 
tle port, and another a little tea, and still 
another a little brandy, and spoiled the 
water and made a — detesta — " 

" Oh, D. ! that's a champagne cocktail, and 
the most refreshing of drinks ! Thank you 
so very much. I don't deserve to be com- 
pared to anything so good !" 



The path at this juncture became too nar- 
row to ride abreast. Dolly's rider shot on 
ahead. In these recollections why does 
Dolly's rider always shoot on ahead ? Who 
wrote the book of Joshua and made him 
the hero of a hundred battles ? Who carved 
on marble and stone the acts of the great 
Pharoah, Rameses II., whose mighty spirit 
pervades all Egypt to this day ? 

Some carper likely will declare there is 
no honeysuckle lane between Hartford and 
Bloomfield. But probably he did not choose 
to take these riders' route to Bloomfield. 
The little lane with which they made ac- 
quaintance is bounded on either side by a 
tall rail-fence, not the most modern style 
of enclosure, and rather primitive and rude 
without its covering of vines, but there is 
nothing quite so pretty when it is intwined 
with Virginia-creeper and trumpet-flowers ; 
the corners bulge out like flying buttresses 
and the vines hang over in cascades, which 
after a while will be aflame with color. Now 
they are a green mantle with the pink 
honeysuckles for a fringe. The bumble- 
bees were zooning, and though they could 
not see the little stream that ran alongside 



the road for the flowers and creepers that 
covered it, they were haunted with the 
sound of running water. 

" It isn't the air or the sunshine or the 
flowers or the sky that makes summer to 
me," said D., " it is that low murmur as if 
of growing things. I can hear the grass 
start and the flowers spring ; day by day the 
soul of things fleeing up countless ladders, 

** ' Airy pyramid of grass. 
At its motion yields a pass. 
Through the wind-loved wheat it flows, 
Up the tufted sedge-flower goes.' " 

I used to say that verse to myself when I 
was a little boy and went out into the mead- 
ow and buried my body in the grass. I 
didn't know whether it was the fairies I 
heard talking or the flowers, but I knew it 
meant life, which was summer, the only time 
we really are alive, the rest of the year we 
are in the chrysalis." 

" Did you really think that when you were 
a child }" asked Dolly's rider. " You know 
the reminiscences of childhood are rarely 
sincere. We relate what it is probable a 
child thought or said under known circum- 



stances, or what we have heard older people 
say we said, but our own memories of our 
own thoughts, are they reliable ? Tolstoi's 
autobiography with * invention ' written on 
every page destroyed my faith in his whole 
scheme of life." 

" Of the thoughts that possessed or flitted 
over my childish mind," said D., lazily, '' my 
recollections are as a dream after daylight. 
I keep them as a laughing summer keeps 
hoar and frost; as an infant's eyes at eve 
show morning grief. As I recall the sound 
of a stream gone by, or a vanished bird's 
song, or chimes that have died a silver 
death, I recollect them as day recollects 
shadows the dawn has put to flight." 

" Oh, D. !" exclaimed Dolly's rider, " you 
don't mean to make me think that very free 
translation of Gautier's UElle que reste-il 
Aujourdhui was your own thoughts about 
yourself when you were a little boy !" 

" The question of the line of demarkation 
between the assimilation of an idea and pla- 
giarism is too subtle to be discussed on a 
racking horse," replied D., oracularly. '* My 
crime was in adapting the idea so clumsily^ 
that you recognized it." 



" But, D.," cried Dolly's rider, who was 
quick to respond to such an unusual, an 
alarming symptom as humility, '' I knew 
because I found your bookmark yesterday 
in Chanso7ts et Ballades T 

*' That's the way doctors diagnose dis- 
eases. They see the oyster-shells under the 
porch, and when they say the patient has 
indigestion, people exclaim, * What wis- 
dom !' " said D., coming to himself with a 
jerk of the bridle. 

That jerk meant a gallop through the lane 
till they reached the main road. At the 
fork they came to a house they had at first 
thought deserted. It was an old, brown 
house, weather-worn, and drooping at the 
eaves, the shutters hung on broken hinges, 
the porch was held up by a rotten post, the 
other had fallen ; tall grass and weeds grew 
in the front yard, and front windows with 
the panes out had the look of a toothless 
mouth. But it had been a good house in 
its day, and the garden at the side was 
planted with peach and apple trees, and 
there were great shrubs and lilac bushes 
blooming in the wantonness of neglect, that 
some time or other must have been pruned 



and tended. The horseback riders thought 
of the people who had lived and labored, 
and hated and loved there, and who prob- 
ably, wherever they are, think about it with 
regretful tenderness, as people do of the 
place they once called home. The desola- 
tion was so apparent that they were startled 
when they saw some chickens run. from be- 
neath the porch, and, surer sign of human 
occupancy, a brood of young ducks waddle 
out of the back yard. They rode around to 
the side entrance, and, though they saw no- 
body, a yellow calico skirt hanging on the 
clothes-line revealed the foolishness of 
theorizing. 

" Oh dear !" moaned Dolly's rider, '' they 
haven't gone away or died or anything. 
Just been shiftless and no faculty — and I 
was just getting ready to — " 

" I know what you were getting ready 
to do," interrupted D. *' You were getting 
ready to sentimentalize over the old home- 
stead, and the ghosts of little feet, and 
mother's arm-chair. It's a remarkable fact 
that eighty-eight poems to the hundred in 
the English language are about home and 
mother. I for one am glad there is no home 



26 



in the French tongue. It saves us from an- 
other deluge of domesticity." 

The bitterness in his tone puzzled Dolly's 
rider for an instant, then a light lightened 
the darkness. " Why, D., it's high noon and 
lunch time!" she exclaimed. They turned the 
horses' heads and galloped home through 
the still, hot sunshine ; so still and hot that 
the horse-chestnuts hung their white blos- 
soms in limp languor and the wind-flowers 
had shut their eyes and the people in the 
suburban villas all gone into the house and 
left the red chairs to emptiness. 

When they got into their own street Dol- 
ly's rider remarked that they had not been to 
Bloomfield. " Bloomfield?" said D., "who 
ever said anything about Bloomfield }" 

*' Nobody said," said Dolly's rider, meekly. 
" They just thought'' 




Ill 



I HEY started at an early hour on 
that perfect day put down in 
the calendar as Tuesday, the 
6th of June. There was a fine 
freshness in the air, and the 
dew on the grass and flowers brought out 
the morning sweetness. 

Turning into Albany Avenue, for a little 
while, they thought they might as well go 
to the capital of that great State whose vote 
will decide the next Presidential election. 
It is a wide, open thoroughfare, big enough 
for two stage-coaches to thunder down it 
twice a day, full of passengers and news ; 
but after they had made up their minds to 
follow it to its destination, Dolly's rider's 
fickle ear was caught by the sound, " Here 
is the famous Blue Hills Road that is one 
of the seven ways to Bloomfield." 

** There's a hill at the top of that stretch, 
D., and it's getting hot ; let's give up Albany 
for to-day," she said, eagerly, and D., with- 



28 



out a word of protest, turned into the fa- 
mous Blue Hills Road. 

This remarkable acquiescence had a sin- 
gular effect. For three good moments Dol- 
ly's rider did not say a word. Then she rode 
up to him and asked if he was angry. The 
relations between these people are like those 
that existed between Mary and Charles 
Lamb. ** We agree pretty well in our tastes 
and habits," says Elia of himself and his 
cousin Bridget — '' yet so as with a difference. 
We are generally in harmony with occa- 
sional bickerings, as it should be with near 
relations. Our sympathies are rather un- 
derstood than expressed ; and once upon 
my dissembling a tone in my voice more 
kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into 
tears and complained that I was altered." 

The Blue Hills Road — the famous Blue 
Hills Road — lies between a succession of 
farms, some of them market-gardens, some 
flower-gardens, some bearing wheat, or per- 
chance some other grain. It is shaded by 
maples and oaks, and there are little houses 
set farther back in the yards than one sees 
on the Farmington Road, but they are not 
so good nor so characteristic. Now and 



29 



then one comes to a splendid oak, strong, 
vigorous, spreading sheltering arms that 
stretch almost from one side of the way to 
the other. But oaks are democratic. They 
grow in the corner of a humble little yard 
consecrated to pigs and chickens, and the 
great place on the hill with landscape gar- 
dens and circular drives is bare of them. 

** Why do you call this road famous, D. ?" 
asked Dolly's rider, after a sunny stretch of 
monotony. 

*' Why do people always speak of their 
towns as 'good old towns?'" replied D. 
'* Besides, / didn't make it famous. That's 
always the way," he continued. ** People 
insist on making the person who is show- 
ing the way or who has read a book first 
responsible for the road or the contents 
of the book. I'd been at Richfield two 
days before Polly arrived, and she asked 
me whether I always had such weather. I 
told her it wasn't my weather. And then 
when I re2id\Fz're and Sword htiovQ you did 
you never left off asking me why Zagobla 
did thus and so, and what Pan Yan meant 
by that. All I have to do with the naming 
of this road is to repeat it has been called 



30 



the famous Blue Hills Road since the settle- 
ment of Hartford." 

But while he was muttering his woes 
something happened. A man in a buggy, 
wearing the United States postal service 
uniform dashed by. He stopped at the fence 
of a little white house with " for sale " pla- 
carded on a sign in the yard. There were 
tall weeds and grasses blocking the walk to 
the door, and a red rose-bush, wild and tur- 
bulent, stretched across the best room win- 
dows. The postman got out and carefully 
extracted a letter from his pocket, looked 
at the vSuperscription and then at the house, 
and started to open the gate. A bent old 
man in his shirt-sleeves was in the back 
yard drawing water from a creaking well. 

" Oh, D. !" cried Dolly's rider, " it's from 
his son out West, you may be sure, and 
they sent it all the way from Hartford by 
special delivery. It has money in it, I'm 
certain, and the money will pay off the mort- 
gage, and the house needn't be sold. Just 
think how really paternal the Government 
is, for a ten-cent stamp sending that man 
and horse all the way out here to bring that 
check to that poor old citizen." 



" He has put the letter in the box on the 
gate-post," said D., dryly, " and now he has 
gone over across the way to give the people 
in the red house their mail. See, he has 
turned back. It's the regular nine o'clock 
delivery — we're not out of corporation lim- 
its yet." 

Dolly's rider's spirits fell, and she felt so 
disappointed that she rode quickly past the 
old man, a vague feeling that she had raised 
hopes merely to dash them overcoming her 
with shame. She needed D.'s "Well, you 
know you didn't say anything to him about 
the check his son had sent him," to restore 
her to tranquillity. 

They had ridden two miles farther, per- 
haps, without adventure, when suddenly D. 
exclaimed, with the air of having known all 
the time what they were coming to, " There 
are the Hartford meadows and the Blue 
Hills. Now you see, I hope, why they call 
this the famous Blue Hills Road." 

An undulating plain stretched before 
them, and beyond was a fringe of willows, 
and farther still an open country free and 
fair, and then the lines of mountains, irreg- 
ular but soft in outline, so far that all the 



32 



green was blue, yet near enough to have a 
sheltering, embracing look, enclosing peace 
and shutting out the world. The meadows 
lay glowing in the sun ; a sweep of daisies, 
another sweep of buttercups, another of pur- 
ple asters, interwoven in the whole and yet 
apart, a carpet of rich hues, a harmony of 
tones. Every now and then Nature makes 
a spurt and shows us what we might be, 
what richness, what beauty, what variety. 
Here are the possibilities of life, every genus 
keeping its own individuality and doing its 
best with it, its best being to grow, to bloom, 
to scatter seed that in other seasons will go 
to the carpeting of wider, fairer fields. In 
sight of it, these people made up their minds 
that even on horseback and riding at full 
tilt down a smooth piece, they could not 
get away from the sermon of the flowers. 

You turn off the main road and take a cut 
across some outlying farms to get to Bloom- 
field. There were flocks and herds lying 
under the trees, and people were hoeing and 
ploughing, some coaxing their teams in the 
Irish brogue, but all Americanized to the 
extent of adapting our slouching gait. Here 
and there was a large old house rambling 



into successive outhouses, but these were 
scattered at long distances, and Dolly's rider, 
who had talked so much about Bloomfield 
that it had become a miniature New York 
in her mind's vision, was disappointed when 
D. said they had got there. 

**Not to the village," he explained, ''but 
the town that is the township; the village is 
yonder." They looked down the hill and 
saw a white spire gleaming; the hot air 
rushed up as from a funnel ; they were un- 
der a sky all sun ; it was quivering and tink- 
ling with bird songs. Indeed, they saw a 
plenty of birds, and birds of every variety ; 
there were finches in three-colored harle- 
quin suits and tanagers in plenty, and red- 
eyes ornithologists call vireo salitarii, who, 
however, did not sing, but fed greedily, not 
holding with Mrs. Browning that we may 
prove our work the better for the sweetness 
of our song, and — the critic may doubt — a 
little humming-bird who gave these riders a 
sensation such as they might have had on 
seeing a flower from the khedive's gardens 
at Shoobra, or a feather from the shah's 
peacock. This tiny insect-like creature is 
indifferent to space. He spent last winter in 



34 



Central America or Cuba; he will fly through 
the air on unwearied wing at the first breath 
of October. What are days or nights to 
him seeking the happy isles ? What the blue 
ether in his search for eternal summer ? 

One wonders how these people who live 
in Bloomfield township amuse themselves ; 
they are too far from the village for tea and 
gossip, and not enough in the country to be 
reconciled to solitude. One woman, they 
saw with pleasure, had adapted herself to 
her surroundings, and yet bent to the cult 
of culture. She had on a man's old straw 
hat and a calico dress made in that happily 
defunct mode known as Mother Hubbard 
fashion, but she was looping vines over her 
porch, and in the yard she had arranged 
what is known in art as a Gypsy Kettle. The 
kettle was painted a bright red, and in it 
grew a flourishing red geranium. The illu- 
sion of a dinner, cooking over a fire out-of- 
doors, was complete. 

Bloomfield reached did not look like New 
York. The houses are small and simple, 
with no soft discoloration of roof or wall, 
but a weather-beaten gray. It is not denied 
that there are mansard roofs and shingles 



35 



twisted awry, and the town-hall is a house 
of wood which we will not say is not built 
on the model of a Grecian temple. But for 
the most part it looks like an agricultural 
village somewhat intrenched upon by the 
modern spirit. 

There are two stores for general merchan- 
dise, and two churches (was there ever a 
community so diminutive as to require only 
one?), the smaller of which, a little wooden 
building, set in a green grove and gleaming 
with white paint and green blinds, delighted 
Dolly's rider. 

** D., I'm so glad to see it," she said. " The 
very church Longfellow had in mind when 
he wrote *The Village Blacksmith.' How 
do I know? Oh, as Falstaff knew the true 
prince, and the witches Macbeth. I should 
like to be here next Sunday and see the 
church filled with people, farmer folk with 
strong, keen faces, the women with a sort 
of Sunday peace in their tired eyes; the 
girls in their white gowns, and the shy, stal- 
wart young fellows with bunches of these 
Bloomfield roses pinned on their coats. I'd 
like to hear the blacksmith's daughter trill- 
ing her clear high notes up there in the 



36 



choir, the bass rolling out his melodious 
measures, a little rubato, and — yes, I really 
would like to listen to the sermon from 
the white-haired clergyman in rusty black 
broadcloth, who reconciles predestination 
and free-will in an hour and a half's dis- 
course." 

'' For Heaven's sake," said D., " talk low 
or somebody will overhear you, and we'll 
be up for libel. The people in Bloomfield 
get their clothes in New York, and they have 
a choral society which directs the time of 
music, and the preacher is giving a course 
of lectures on Esoteric Buddhism." 

He looked anxiously over his shoulder, and 
Dolly's rider, who is moral to the extent of 
feeling sorry for the consequences of sin, 
galloped out of Bloomfield, and did not feel 
safe till they got to Tumbledown Brook, 
which they ventured to think out of the se- 
lectmen's jurisdiction. They did not cross 
the bridge, but went down into the water 
and let Dolly and the bay splash about in 
that cool stream. There were tall purple 
irises on the banks of this pretty brook with 
the melodious name, growing straight and 
strong amid cascades of ferns, and as they 



37 



looked under the arch of the bridge they 
followed the course of the stream through a 
winding way, banked on either side with 
wild roses, that turned their round, pink 
faces to the sunshine. 

They met only one travelling party be- 
tween Bloom field and the Albany turnpike. 
An ancient buggy drawn by a long sorrel 
horse, who might have been a plough-horse 
or a racer, it was hard to guess, drawing 
an old man and his little grandson, for so 
these people divined their relationship. The 
old man had little blue eyes set in red flan- 
nel lids, and he wore a black broadcloth 
coat and flowered vest, his cotton shirt had 
a wide collar sewed to the band, and a wide 
brimmed felt-hat was pulled over his ears. 
The boy's mother, mindful of his irresponsi- 
ble and extravagant way of growing, had 
made his jeans trousers very long, and his 
little white shirt, which almost reached his 
knees, was buttoned to them. He stood up 
straight in the buggy and drove carefully, 
his freckled little face somewhat puckered, 
but his mouth firm and solemn. The old 
man clucked to the horse as if he were help- 
ing in the business of getting home, but the 



38 



boy knew where the responsibility lay. D. 
touched his hat to them and smiled, which 
Dolly knew meant, '' I like that boy," and 
they both nodded back gravely, but they 
did not take off their hats, deeming it, per- 
haps, a silly city fashion. 

*' And I like them for it," said Dolly's 
rider, stoutly. " I like to see people now 
and then who are a law unto themselves, 
and act as if they believed, even while ex- 
ercising the small courtesies of life, what 
the Constitution of the United States has 
declared, that all men are free and equal." 

" Where does the Constitution make that 
interesting declaration ?" queried D. 

" That all men are free and equal ? Why, 
it says it, of course ; I don't know exactly 
where, it's enough that it's there — I don't 
carry the Constitution in my pocket." 

" If you did you'd be safe never to find 
it," mocked D. *' Some brigands caught an 
American woman going through Bulgaria the 
other day. She told them her jewels were 
in her pocket. After three hours' search 
they let her go, giving up the job. But 
that's not the point. Nowhere in the Con- 
stitution is there any such phrase — it says — " 



** Oh, well — the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, then," interrupted Dolly's rider. ** I'm 
always getting them mixed." 

" There is neither such a phrase nor such 
an idea in the Declaration," said D., turning 
into Albany Avenue. 

"Then," exclaimed Dolly's rider, ecstati- 
cally, "I invented it. I feel like the Bour- 
geois Gentilhomme when he found he was 
talking prose." 

But D. smiled compassionately. "You 
are simply quoting a phrase most governors 
of most States and most orators in the re- 
public use and ascribe to the Constitution. 
You were misinformed, that was all." 
, " Then we are not all free and equal ?" 
said Dolly's poor rider, disillusioned; "that 
is, not by the Constitution .^" 

" Oh, you are by a ' higher law,' perhaps," 
he said, lightly. "Mr. Seward used that 
phrase with good effect in early war times, 
when we wanted to make the proclamation 
of freedom. But it's too hot to use it now. 
It's too hot to do anything but go home." 

And so they sought that refuge which has 
its uses when every other fails. 




IV 

>^ ALF-PAST eight o'clock a.m. ; 
' [^ thermometer 84° in the shade. 
They thought they would get 
to the open country by cross- 
ing Farmington Avenue at a 
little new street bordered by little green 
bushes and shrubs, but the little bushes cast 
no shadows, and the horseback riders passed 
through a fiery furnace of unobstructed sun- 
shine. Dolly's eyes followed the gnats as 
they swam in the air, and her head swam with , 
them. How much heat poured from a pre- 
cipitate height would dissolve a solid into a 
liquid.^ How much heat burning into that 
liquid would change it into a ray of light? 
It was a strange sensation this — melting away 
before one's own eyes, disappearing in a flood 
of self. She watched the process in an imper- 
sonal, disinterested sort of way — the way Ha- 
drian watched his soul's flight in the pretty 
poem : 

** Animula, vagula, blandula, 
Hospes comesque corporis," 



41 



and was taking a kind of dreamy pleasure 
in feeling the cumbrous flesh glow lighter, 
freer, more ethereal each instant, preparing 
to merge itself into a speck of gold and then 
to dance off and flicker through a green 
bough, when D.'s warning voice roused her. 

'* You'll lose your figure if you don't look 
out." 

He said it in the tone he had heard mem- 
bers of his household use to each other 
when it was a question between cream with 
strawberries or a slender form, and the fa- 
miliar sound and words had their effect. 
Dolly's rider lowered the thermometer twen- 
ty degrees by turning into Asylum Avenue, 
where the south-west wind met them and 
blew them into the seventies. 

They got a fine view of the open country 
at the head of this street. The meadows 
are free of trees, except for a single oak 
here and there, or a spreading maple, and 
the sweep of the clover and grass is unob- 
structed on lowlands and uplands till the 
clearing is stopped by a deep border of pines. 
They looked cool and grateful to the eyes 
after that stretch of sun. At the black- 
smith's shop at the cross - roads Dolly's 



42 



rider announced that the pair were thirsty, 
and so they rode up to a weather-beaten 
house at the top of the hill where a woman 
was ironing, her bench and board set out 
under the shade of a spreading elm. She 
was a tall, gaunt woman, poorly clad, and 
a number of infinitesimally small children 
were playing about her. The bay, restive 
after his gallop, plunged and wanted to go, 
so Dolly's rider forestalled D.'s getting off 
by asking her for a drink of water. She at 
once laid down her hot iron and made for 
the well. "No, no; just that from the pail 
there," they expostulated. But she smiled, 
and said : " I will draw you some. I only 
wish I had the old well-sweep. I've a sort 
of sentiment for those old wells. The water 
always seemed to me to be fresher and 
purer, especially if it's out of the old oaken 
bucket that hangs in the well." 

"That's New England all over," said D., 
as they rode off. " That woman has prob- 
ably never been out of this township since 
she was married. She is poor, hard worked ; 
she doesn't have time probably to read a 
newspaper from daylight till dark; all her 
life is a round of daily drudgery; but she 



43 



has a refinement. Did you notice her ac- 
cent, and a sentiment, even, that makes her 
wish for the well -sweep instead of that 
thing with a crank she turned, even if the 
crank is easier ? Where else would you see 
a middle-aged woman, in a worn calico 
dress, ironing, and minding her children, 
and having an eye to the kitchen fire — all at 
the same time ; and in the midst of it pre- 
serving a certain shy sentiment, and stop- 
ping in the midst of her work to be hospit- 
able and to quote poetry ?" 

Dolly's rider looked thoughtful. " When 
I write a novel, D. — oh, its simply a matter 
of practice and training ; anybody can ; none 
of the novelists nowadays have any talent ; 
they despise talent, which is just an allure- 
ment into ideality instead of into what is 
real and true — I shall not try to make my 
New England woman just a creature in a 
narrow, prescribed world, crucifying her 
body and soul trying to keep up appear- 
ances, and pretending she has three gowns 
when she has only one. I shall put her in 
antislavery days, and under an orthodox 
minister, and let her work it out. There was 
tragedy enough then in these still New Eng- 



44 



(and villages. I got a hint of what it was 
when I was on a carriage drive in Massachu- 
setts last summer, and stopped at a little vil- 
lage for dinner. There was only one parlor 
in the tavern, so I didn't have to be conscien- 
tious and walk away when I got interested 
in a conversation. They were evidently old 
friends, who had met after a long separation. 
The man was a Westerner — that is, he had 
gone West in his early manhood ; the other, 
an elderly woman, had stayed at home. He 
was big and prosperous and florid (he talked 
as if he were used to talk against a tornado) ; 
but she was little and prim and poor (her 
dress showed it), but her face was seamed 
with lines of determination ; that little firm 
jaw, and small, thin -lipped mouth. From 
the drift of the conversation, I inferred the 
lady was talking of some common friend. 
*I can't take you to see her,' she said, re- 
gretfully. 'You see we haven't really talked 
to each other for years. It was in the early 
abolition times we fell out. The Unitari- 
ans came in and I joined them, and then 
I joined the antislavery movement. She 
stayed orthodox. Her sister Mary Lizzie 
went with me. It was an awful time — fam- 



45 



ilies and friends divided. We were willing 
enough to be friendly, but they wouldn't. 
Jane passed me on the street for years with- 
out speaking. We suffered some — we come- 
outers.' 

" The man laughed. ' You are a queer set 
here. You know I am a distiller/ he said, 
' and last year I wrote out to Jonah to send 
me two barrels of apples ; they were, of 
course, for table use. He always was the 
best fellow in the world j couldn't get religion 
when he was a boy — was too wicked, had no 
conviction of sin. / got it easy enough, 
and I guess he has by now. Well, he wrote 
back he was very sorry, but he couldn't send 
me the apples, because he was afraid I'd 
make some sort of spirit out of them. Pret- 
ty dear spirit! The apples were to cost 
$2.50 a barrel, and I make a gallon of 
whiskey out of 25 cents' worth of corn ; but 
you see the conscience of the fellow.* And 
then he went to the little window and 
looked out in the street." 

" That's the queer contradictory sort of 
stuff they're made of," said D., *' these New 
Englanders. I suppose that Yankee farmer 
yearned to sell his winter apples, but he 



46 



loved something better than he did money, 
dear as that was. It makes a queer char- 
acter, that thrift and cunning and saving 
spirit held in check by principles that lie 
like a granite foundation/' 

" And speaking of the difficulty of getting 
religion," said Dolly's rider, '* up in Charle- 
mont I heard a story about the village shoe- 
maker. Everybody got religion in the peri- 
odical revival but Uncle Billy. At last the 
clergyman called on him in person and 
urged the matter on his attention. 'Well,' 
said Uncle Billy, 'I'll make a bargain. If 
you can convert me, I'll give you the best 
hog in my pasture.' The parson accepted 
the proposition, and they knelt down. Af- 
ter a fervent prayer of perhaps a half an 
hour the speaker paused. ' Go on,' said Un- 
cle Billy, ' the hog's mine yet.' " 

D. laughed. " That was his New England 
conscience; you see, he could no more 
let the clergyman have the hog if he hadn't 
justly earned it than he could have pre- 
tended to have got religion. But where is 
Tumbledown Brook .^" 

For it may as well be confessed here that 
the statement made in the last chapter that 



47 



the riders visited this charming spot was in- 
correct. They passed a brook, it is true, and 
the water tumbled prettily and the bridge 
looked as if it was going to , but it was not 
Tumbledown Brook. However, for their 
oath's sake — for they had promised them- 
selves to go there — they rode till- they passed 
the blacksmith's shop on the main road and 
turned into the wagon -road on the right, 
where they were assured they would find 
the fabled spring. A jolly-looking Irishman 
was coming down the path. 

" How far is it to Tumbledown Brook?" 
asked Dolly's rider. 

" It's as hot as blazes," said Paddy. 

" Yes, I know ; but how far is it }" 

" It's as hot as blazes, I says." 

" Yes, yes, I know , but how far is it to 
Tumbledown Brook?" 

A puzzled look passed his face. He had 
been accustomed, they inferred, to the sort 
of person who took his casual remarks as a 
reply to any question put to him. 

" It's as hot as bla — ," he began, when D. 
rode up to him and fixed his gaze. 

" How far is it to Tumbledown Brook, I 
say?" he demanded, stopping the way. 



48 



A light suddenly appeared to break on 
his inner being. 

" Gosh !" he cried, " and it's a little bet- 
ter*n a mile from here to the top of the hill, 
and it's a good half mile from the top of the 
hill where I've been working to the woods." 

'' And is the brook in the woods ?" said 
Dolly's rider. 

'' There's birds and trees there and a 
pretty path," he said, with a pleasant smile, 
"and it's a good day I am wishing you." 

Both the horseback people nodded back 
again and smiled. 

" I like Irish people," said Dolly's rider; 
'' they can't bear to disappoint you by tell- 
ing you they don't know." 

"They neVer disappoint me by telling me 
that," said D. " I wonder if there is any 
such place as Tumbledown Brook ?" 

They rode on; the sun broiled and sizzled. 
They came to a great bare expanse where 
200 workmen were hard at it clearing space 
for a reservoir. The great basin was shorn 
of its trees, a drill in the centre, an infernal 
looking black machine, uttering its buzzing 
roar; the men were marching in line carry- 
ing hods of red earth on their heads ; the 



work of cleaning out that great red-hot 
caldron looked like one of the hopeless 
tasks set by some malignant deity in an 
inferno. 

They skirted the basin and rode into the 
green wood on the brow of the hill — oh, so 
still and green after the fiery furnace ! — and 
walked their panting horses under the hem- 
locks dusky and sweet, and the fir-trees, 
whose fine pine-needles turned the ring of 
the hoofs to silence. Long shafts of light 
trembled through the birches dark and 
green and the maples dark and silvery, 
and through the delicate fans of the great 
red-oak leaves which flapped like monster 
dragon -flies in the wind. Tufted ferns 
waved in patches of brown and green moss, 
the azaleas growing in the sunny spots were 
spread with honey lest the dull bee forget 
to feed ;.» the fir-cones thrust out their 
feathered heads from tangles of grasses and 
fungi, and by the trickling streams the toads 
had raised their small wet tents. Jewelled 
creatures, brown and old, moved in the 
green things ; the riders looked up into the 
trees and saw bright, timid eyes shining, and 
heard the scamper of small feet and the rush 



50 



and beat of wings. A damp, sweet smell 
came up from the swamp, but where was 
Tumbledown Brook? 

They rode to the clearing, then across 
country and into Reservoir Park; before 
they entered the wood they looked over 
the meadows covered with waving sedge, 
dark as it was bent by the wind, reflecting 
a grayish light from its under side. A farm- 
house here and there ; a stretch of field ; a 
fair open country ; wooded heights ; red 
roads cutting through patches of green ; 
the sun shining on a weather-beaten gray 
barn turning it to silver — this is what they 
saw from the mountain-side ; no Hartford, 
no Tumbledown Brook. 

The Reservoir Park was also dark and 
green, and all this wood was alive with 
sound. The What, what, what of the screech- 
owl, the creak of the cricket, the brown pee- 
wees '' cheeping " under the bushes, the 
caws of the crows, the song of the redeye 
singing for love, and of the wood -thrush 
singing for glory. The wind also took its 
part in the harmonious discords, and rustled 
and sighed and showered down pine leaves 
and turned the lily pads upsidedown to 



5' 



show the crimson underneath. There was 
a trickle of water and murmur of hidden 
rills that flowed from little cool springs. 
The pools had shrunk to summer heat ; on 
the sides, smooth, whitish water; in the 
middle, dark blue. The riders looked at 
the little minnows shut up in these clear 
basins, and sighed. Happy minnows ! no 
big fish to eat you ; no channel to lure you 
out of peace ! 

They took the road to the lower lake ; it 
lay enclosed in the green woods, a sapphire 
set in emerald, shining with an inward fire. 
Midway in its clear depths the broken re- 
flections of the sun danced like a rambow 
on a flame of phosphorescent light, and 
close to the shore the rays fell obliquely — a 
shower of gold and precious jewels, as 
though Danae were hid in the tall grass. 
The woods on the opposite shore looked 
dim, the haze of full noon settling upon 
them in blue mistiness. Ferns and iris, 
praised of the poets, the broad leaf pota- 
mogen rearing its great spikes, yellow ra- 
nunculus, pink swamp - lilies, lupins, blue 
and white with cup-like leaves to hold the 
dew — all these and many another thirsty 



52 



blossom fringed the banks. Was this the 
limpid stream and these the fields of Enna 
where Proserpina gathered flowers ? It 
was not Tumbledown Brook. 

And it had as well be admitted here that 
Tumbledown Brook was never reached by 
them. No more did the ancient voyagers 
find the spring of immortal youth ; but they 
did not regret their quest. In looking for 
a little babbling stream, they found deep 
waters, and in exchange for the ferns and 
the bright-eyes that grew upon its bank, 
they strayed into the meadows of a goddess. 
And, in a way, they have the brook forever, 
for it dwells in their fancy— clearer, purer, 
sounding a sweeter melody than any brook 
that has its dwelling in the common-place- 
ness of memory. One cannot be disillu- 
sioned of this sort of illusion, for it has no 
vulgar reality. And it is well for us that 
there are some places which must always 
exist in the imagination. If we could real- 
ize our visions we would not mount to 
heaven; we would simply bring heaven 
down to earth, and so limit ourselves to a 
purely practical existence. 

'' D.," said Dolly's rider, coming out of the 



53 



woods into the open, and regarding with 
sickening apprehension the white, stony, 
sun-smit road that lay between the paradise 

of Street and the spot where they 

stood, " why caiit we fly ?" 

And D., in a cheerful and knowing tone, 
quoted Mr. Snagsby : '' No wings." 




V 

^ VEN D. admits that summer has 
been pretty persistent. We 
have had at least five days of 
, ^.^^^ ^ it in succession. We haven't 
s^cXa^^^ lighted the parlor fire since 
last Saturday ; visitors whisper to each oth- 
er in a confidential way that they have left off 
their flannels or have them on, making a 
merit of it in either case as people do about 
their intimate affairs. " I dared," " I resist- 
ed," one hears in asides, in the one case 
flaunting the recklessness, in the other the 
endurance. The white duck suit has made 
its appearance. This costume lasts a long 
time in New England. Every well-dressed 
man has one ; but as he only gets a chance to 
wear it once in two years, and then for half an 
hour at a time, unless he has a stationary fig- 
ure, his white duck has to show some adapt- 
ability. It would be silly to throw away a 
perfectly good, fresh - looking suit, neither 
worn nor rubbed, because the waistcoat is a 



55 



trifle tight and the coat a suspicion short- 
waisted; so for the fleeting summer days, 
when we get up in the nineties, we have a rare 
show of Hartford men in white Hnen clothes. 

What's fashion, anyway ? Trousers a tri- 
fle short? Englishmen wear them turned 
up over their shoe-tops all the year long — 
besides, it may rain. ''Keep pulling your 
coat down in the back ; it hitches up a lit- 
tle." " Yes, you look very nice, so becom- 
ing. I don't think it makes the very least 
difference ; everybody understands. I don't 
believe a human being would notice. To 
be sure, if you stand that way inviting at- 
tention, doing everything to make it con- 
spicuous, of course — Lost your figure? 
Nonsense ; not lost, but gone before." 

It is with these sweet home voices ring- 
ing in his ears the Hartford householder 
starts off every day this week, looking in 
his snowy apparel as much like a West 
Indian proprietor as possible. Another 
week of summer and he will have bought 
a Panama hat. We are trusting creatures. 

The horseback riders started out with 
the intention of riding into the bank of 
low white clouds that hid the woods on 



56 



the right of Cedar Hill Cemetery. It was 
hot and dusty and after noon, but the haze 
lent itself to the landscape. The Cedar 
Hill Cemetery road rises and falls with the 
regularity of a pulse beat, and at every ele- 
vation the view widens and extends till it is 
stopped on the right by the Talcott range 
and on the left by the meadows of the Con- 
necticut River. The nearer view of Hart- 
ford shows its red houses set in clumps of 
green trees, but a dip in the valley and only 
the church -spires rise out of the woods. 
Take them out of the landscape, and take 
out the cultivated fields that lie on either 
side of the road and stretch to the river on 
the one hand and the mountains on the oth- 
er, and there is not a great deal of differ- 
ence between the view the horseback riders 
had that afternoon and the sight vouch- 
safed the first settlers when at last their ex- 
pectant eyes rested on the promised land. 
A wilderness of trees, a dense forest which 
a foreigner would not dream concealed a 
city and its people in its green depths. 

The highest civilization has brought the 
face of Nature back to its original aspect, for 
Nature and man are instinctively at enmity. 



57 



She raises barriers of wood and stone against 
his inroads. She throttles him with her vines 
and creepers, tangles him in her branches, 
tempts him with bright flowers into wilder- 
nesses where he loses his way and is lured 
to his death. He spends years of toil in 
fighting the inroads of the forest, conquer- 
ing Nature, clearing her out, rooting her 
out, subduing her; and when finally she 
yields, and he has cut and burned and 
trampled his way so that she lies a maimed, 
wounded thing at his feet, he goes to work 
to revivify her. He replants trees, sows 
seeds, christens weeds and flowers with roll- 
ing syllables, and in some spot selected by 
himself gives her what he pleases to call her 
liberty. " It looks like the country," is the 
highest praise one can bestow on some spot 
where he has elected Nature may follow her 
own bent. 

In this fancy for swinging back to the 
original starting-point we don't confine our- 
selves to physical retrogression. As soon 
as we've got a religion w^ell in hand, intel- 
lectual, comprehensive, liberal enough for 
us, we begin to search for the creed of the 
simple savage. The theosophists got back 



S8 



to the Iswara of the Hindus, and/finding it 
quite rococo, are now hunting for what 
they call the Mahath Aitamyam — whatever 
that may mean, less meaning the better — of 
the whole cosmos. What does all this clamor 
for simplicity in thought, religion, manners, 
and life signify but going back into the 
wilderness we came from ? 

" D.," said Dolly's rider, looking over the 
fields which were so hardly won from sav- 
age Nature and savage man, *' I should think 
you'd feel pretty badly, when you consider 
what your ancestors endured when they 
came over and settled this country ; how 
they suffered privation and cold and hun- 
ger, and how they battled with the forest 
and stony ground all for the sake of Calvin- 
ism and Puritanism, and now is the Woman 
of the Seven Hills seated in glory and honor 
in your midst. All we can see of Hartford 
from this hill, except the gold ball of the 
capitol, are the twin towers of the Roman 
Catholic cathedral. You said I did not 
know my Constitution of the United States 
or my Declaration of Independence when I 
ventured to quote them the other day, but 
doesn't it seem queer to you that the coun- 



59 



try where the Roman Catholic Church has 
grown and flourished as it has done in no 
other country since its foundation, is gov- 
erned under a constitution whose principles 
the church violently condemns ? 

** You know the theory of the republic is 
all men are free whatever the words of 
the Constitution may say. Everybody, pro- 
vided he doesn't interfere with anybody 
else, may go his own way, worship accord- 
ing to his own forms or no forms, speak his 
own thoughts, have a free press, education 
— be at liberty, in fact. 

"But the syllabus says men are not free ; 
they are not capable of taking care of them- 
selves; that the clergy must govern the 
laity; that education and the press must 
be under censorship ; and as for liberty of 
thought, the very declaration that the Catho- 
lic religion is true and all others false puts 
an end to the theory of toleration." 

" I will not argue with a person who gets 
her ideas of a democracy so literally from 
Froude," said D., *'and who has a mere 
surface knowledge of the tenets of her gov- 
ernment. The fact of the case is, religion 
should meet all human wants. Our the- 



ology in New England got too intellectual. 
It was a philosophical religion, and reached 
only a certain portion of the people. 
You've got to have your religion in pro- 
portion to your intelligence. That ad- 
vanced set of Protestantism of Schleier- 
macher and Bunsen we've been having for 
the last twenty years has run over into a 
sort of society for ethical culture, and the 
ethical culture has resolved itself in an or- 
ganization to prevent dulness. When I go 
to church nowadays I expect to be amused 
or entertained. Sometimes the preacher 
diverts me by telling me about the Holy 
Land, sometimes he tries slides and magic 
lanterns, or he discusses the questions of 
the day, the labor problem, etc.; but I think 
slides have the popular preference." 

Dolly's rider drew out her deadliest 
weapon — others of her sex have employed 
it before. 

" Oh, if you are going to be irreverent — " 
"Catholicism may not appeal to you or 
me," said D., taking no notice, "but for 
people who must get their living by physi- 
cal labor and have not time nor inclination 
for speculation, or for people who are tired 



6i 



of their own judgments and willing to trust 
to somebody who will take the responsi- 
bility for them, Catholicism is the final 
refuge. 

" I think it is Miss Edwards who says the 
primitive man must have a fetish, the fellah- 
een of all countries demand a veiled Isis. 
They revere mystery, when they understand 
they can be neither awed nor terrified. 
What was that about the scarlet woman 
reigning on the Connecticut hills .^ There 
IS a subtle red tinge over things — see how 
it has changed since last week." 

Sure enough, the yellowish-green tint that 
since early last spring had prevailed over 
the meadows and fields had deepened to a 
reddish glow. 

The sun, shining through low white 
clouds, looked like a red midsummer flow- 
er. The grass had a rosy hue, clover-fields 
mixed with sorrel in full bloom or purple- 
red geranium. The white and yellow flow- 
ers in the little gardens on the highway had 
given place to red blossoms, red roses, red 
hollyhocks, smocks, and petunias. Other 
details caught the eye. 

Lambskills, dogsbane, and other rich- 



62 



glowing flowers were tangled with the wild 
roses in the fence corners, red cattle were 
feeding in the fields. As long as green and 
yellow were the colors spring lingered. This 
glowing tint means summer — lusty, full- 
bldoded, luxuriant. 

'' If this were France or Germany," said 
D., '* you'd think it very picturesque." 

On either side of the road were little 
market gardens, in which women and men 
were working; the latter were bareheaded, 
and generally wore bright-colored garments. 
One old woman, in a brilliant red petticoat, 
bending over in a cabbage-patch, might have 
been a study for a painter. There was a 
little white cottage set back from the cab- 
bage-patch, in a garden of pink hollyhocks, 
and on the porch was a young lady in a 
white dress swinging in a hammock. 

" Marmar," called the young lady to the 
old woman, " it's most time for you to come 
in and get supper." 

The illusion vanished. No, they were not 
in France or Germany, but Irish-America. 

"D.," said Dolly's rider, ''the overflow of 
Ireland into America may have uprooted or 
rather choked out Puritanism ; but perhaps 



63 



we owe some of the adaptability that makes 
Americans the most cosmopolitan of races 
to a people who have so much gayety, so 
much good-nature as well as caprice. You 
know it takes a lot of the feminine quality 
to make a character interesting, and the 
Irish more than any other supply that trait 
in our make-up. Think what we were for 
stiffness and reserve when we were all Puri- 
tan-English !" 

" I don't know that we mayn't admit, for 
sake of conversation," said D., ''that the 
want of tact we complain of in English peo- 
ple is a lack of feminine quality; but you 
know what I think of tact." 

''I'm not going to be rude and tell you 
you have it," said Dolly's rider. *'If you 
want to be all masculine or all English you're 
welcome. At least, they have none of the 
effusiveness of The Sex. Do you remember 
the officer we met up the Nile ? He had 
served under Gordon and idolized him. 
Talking about his untimely death, he said, 
* I can tell you this : when I heard he had 
been murdered I was cross.' And the wom- 
an who recommended the soup to her hus- 
band at an American dinner-party as 'not 



64 



half so nasty as it looked,' and the lover who 
proposed to a girl by saying, ' I shouldn't 
mind our getting married, should you ?' I 
suppose that's the reason so many English- 
men marry American women — they want a 
female person ; and also why so few English 
women marry American men — they do 7iot 
want a female person." 

" I suppose there is really no limit to what 
a person may suppose," said D. " But when 
people begin to theorize as to why anybody 
ever marries anybody else they tie them- 
selves to the tail of a kite. All the theories 
ever advanced about marriage any way are 
not worth a row of pins." 

" Oh, if you're going to talk slang as well 
as those dreadful revolutionary sentiments 
I shall go home," said Dolly's rider, turning 
the horse's head towards Hartford. 

D. gave the bay a cut and caught up with 
them. 

" Slang ! Ah, my Lady Philistina," he said, 
with triumph in his voice, '* I feel like Mr. 
Grant White when the English duchess cor- 
rected him in the same imperious manner 
for the same 'Americanism,' as she sup- 
posed. Do you not mind you of the passage 



65 



in the sad scene in " Richard II." in which 
the Queen, apprehensive of her coming 
woes, says: 

" ' But stay, here come the gardeners ; 
Let us step into the shadow of the trees. 
My wretchedness unto a row of pins 
They'll talk of state.'" 

For the first and only time during their 
horseback rides it is the duty of the scribe 
to put on record that D. had the last word. 
Even Dolly's rider must perforce yield to 
Shakespeare, but her chagrin lasted into 
the vSunset. The hills in the west had been 
darkening for an hour or more, and all at 
once they became a deep indigo blue, and 
defined themselves into mountains. A little 
while ago the horseback riders had taken 
them for clouds. The sun sank in a round 
red ball, the after-glow followed soon, a 
bright scarlet that set on fire two small 
white clouds on the horizon ; they looked 
like little burning castles with the light 
streaming through the windows, and as the 
conflagration spread they tumbled into the 
flames. The western sky was a purple waste 
of sea when they saw it from their own 
woods. 



VI 




I HE air was cleared by the thun- 
der - storms and rains, but 
scarcely cooled. The damp 
summer has kept the leaves 
fresh and green and luxuriant. 
One can ride ten miles in any direction 
around Hartford and not go out of the 
shade for more than five minutes at a 
stretch, but trees and rain are both down in 
D.'s books as nuisances. The rain — well, 
there is no excuse for rain, he says, except 
that it is necessary, like death or life or any 
other discipline; it insures some sort of vege- 
tation, to be sure, but that doesn't save many 
a harsh landscape from being unattractive. 

*' Haven't I told you," he announces in 
his most dictatorial tone, "that the high 
plateaus of New Mexico and Arizona have 
everything that the rainy wilderness lacks 
— sunshine. Heaven's own air, immense 
breadth of horizon, color, and infinite beau- 
ty of outline.^ What need of rain when 



67 



science can regulate all the moisture we 
need? For my part I want to live in a 
country where the hose and I can make our 
own vegetation. I like the unlimited free- 
dom of a treeless, rainless land, its infinite 
expansion, its floods of light, its waves of 
color, the translucent atmosphere that aids 
the imagination to create what it will. When 
you get to the green fields and the trees you 
know all about it, however beautiful ; it has 
the effect of a familiar tune, a touch of the 
commonplace, and if you are not an igno- 
ramus you must be aware that trees and 
rain do most of the mischief in the way of 
creating disease. Where do the germs of 
consumption wither and die.'^ In a treeless 
desert. Where do they germinate ? In a 
New England farm-house, embedded in syl- 
van shades." 

" D.," said Dolly's rider, " if you had the 
making of it you'd manufacture a much 
better world than the one we have, wouldn't 
you ? Don't be modest, say what you really 
think." 

" i, at least, having known the failures in 
this one, would try to profit by experience," 
said D., thoughtfully. " I have never seen 



68 



a farmer who was satisfied with his crops. 
Every man insists he has had less rain than 
his neighbor, or more, if rain is not needed. 
A seasonable or a reasonable rain is the 
most difficult thing the tiller of the soil ever 
has to acknowledge to." 

"You couldn't have these elms in your 
desert, D.," said Dolly's rider, "and you 
couldn't be without them." 

They were going to Newington along the 
lovely, shady road that stretches from Park- 
ville to that pretty village. A succession of 
splendid elms, as large as the largest oaks, 
and spreading dense green branches over- 
head marks the way. Up there in the leafy 
columns the wood-thrushes were singing ; 
their notes, falling on the still, hot air, sound- 
ed like the jangling of keys on a steel bar. 

We talk about the sterility of the New 
England soil, and it is often stony and un- 
fruitful near the surface, but that outer cov- 
ering, hard and unyielding, is no more a 
proof of barrenness than manners are a 
proof of morals. The roots of the elms work 
their way into the dark recesses of the earth. 
What depth of richness do they find there ! 
What strength and nourishment ! And as 



69 



the seasons pass, and the stripling grows 
into the tree, and the roots spread and en- 
large, as the branches stretch forth great 
limbs, how the warm, rich soil gives up its 
treasures. What secret springs water it ! 
What rich juices feed it ! The difficulty, 
beloved, is not with our New England. It 
is with us who do not dig down deep 
enough to find its treasures. 

*' I would not get rid of these elms in this 
landscape and under these conditions," said 
D., in his most fair-minded manner. " They 
do very well for trees, but it's the condi- 
tions I object to. Set a man down in a 
desert of perpetual sunshine and no water, 
except what he brings in a trough from a 
distant mountain, and he can regulate his 
life. He can have potatoes and strawber- 
ries and grass in the same garden. He can 
even have a garden-party when he's a mind 
to, without insuring a storm, if there ever 
was a man with a mind who wanted a gar- 
den-party! He is independent in a word. 
But what sort of independence is this of 
mine that the first cloud that floats along 
the horizon has it in its power to drench 
me to my skin and lay me up with rheuma- 



70 



tism ? Why, I spend half my life looking at 
the barometer. I'm always waiting to be 
interfered with. There is no such tyrant as 
weather, and no matter how whimsical it 
is they will call it nature. It would be a 
mighty different nature if I and a watering- 
pot had the regulating of it.'* 

There comes a time when the most timid 
of mortals is constrained to give testimony. 

"D.," said Dolly's rider, indignantly, "I 
don't believe if you had your way you'd do 
a bit better than Providence. As for inde- 
pendence, I'm sure you wouldn't know what 
to do with it. I won't discuss your attitude 
on important subjects, but just in the mat- 
ter of your household and your dress. You 
always want to do and to look exactly like 
every other man. You all imitate each 
other to the detail of the tie of a cravat or 
the size of a walking-cane, and go on disfig- 
uring yourself with the most hideous cos- 
tume ever invented, because if you revolted 
in any particular you'd look different from 
the rest. As for matters in daily life we'd 
be cooking our food in leaves in a hollow 
in the ground if women had waited for men 
to buy cooking stoves, and be sitting on our 



71 



hands if it were left to you to get new par- 
lor furniture. If a true history of the world 
were ever written we'd find out who insti- 
gated all the great movements. To be sure, 
and that's the pathetic part of it, women 
are always the power behind the throne." 

" It is not denied that you are mischief- 
makers," said D., ''and there is a legend 
that when the tempted one said to Satan, 
*Get thee behind me,' the devil obeyed, 
taking the form of an enticing female. 
Hence, you see, the term you just now 
used. I admit we are not as eccentric as 
women, we don't wear outre clothes or 
make ourselves conspicuous in dress or 
manner of living, because we have a sense 
of humor which warns us of our liability to 
be ridiculous. Women as a general thing 
are lacking in humor. The first man who 
made his appearance looking like a balloon 
or with a hump on his back would have 
been laughed out of his hoop-skirt and his 
tournure. But you saw only the novelty, 
not the absurdity, and went to imitating 
them." 

** D.," said Dolly's rider, " statements are 
not arguments ; women do possess humor. 



72 



I could quote Miss Austen and George 
Eliot—" 

** No, no," said D., '* don't quote. Quo- 
tations spoil the look of a sentence. When 
I say women are lacking in humor and you 
remind me of Miss Austen and George 
Eliot, you condemn your cause by making 
them an exception to the general rule. 
When you say men lack humor, I don't 
refute you by naming Shakespeare. You're 
like the English official who defended the 
Egyptian character. I said all Arabs lied, 
and he indignantly replied he knew three 
who were absolutely truthful." 

There is one advantage horseback riding 
has over other modes of locomotion. It 
is possible to put an end to a conversation 
by riding ahead. Dolly's rider turned from 
the main road into a rocky, bushy field that 
lay between two cultivated farms, a sort of 
hollow basin to catch the sunbeams that 
streamed lavishly into it. The ground 
was dotted over with patches of feathery, 
barren grass, barberry bushes and creeping 
juniper, scrub oaks and slim young tulip- 
trees, with silver sycamores. Wild roses 
and indigo-weed made splashes of color on 



73 



the green, and *'love vine," tangled in and 
out the dusk of the leaves, webs of spun 
sunshine. Great gray bowlders sprawled in 
the thickets, looking like Brobdingnagian 
lizards of changing hues, as the sunlight 
flickered on their gray backs. In the crev- 
ices of the rocks, blossoming sweetbrier 
straggled. This flower has an innocent 
perfume that reminds one of the primitive 
affections. They looked in vain for any- 
thing useful in this pleasant place, but not 
even blackberries ripened there, nor wild 
grapes that grew on neighboring fences and 
scented the air. 

In thrifty New England no field lies fal- 
low or overrun with useless weeds without 
an effort to make it do its part in the labor 
of life. The horseback people knew this 
field had been tilled and sown and finally 
abandoned in despair, but none the less was 
it a feature in the landscape. Now the 
rainbow is not utilitarian ; no painter ever 
dipped his brush in the vermilion of the 
sunset, nor seraph on lightest wing so much 
as poised in his flight on the stately battle- 
ments that guard the horizon. If Nature 
paints the heavens day after day with ships 



74 



that sail on fabled waters, castles that no 
man inhabits, colors that vanish as we gaze, 
lights that flame and die ; if all the sky is 
a splendid spectacle exhibited not to in- 
struct but to please, not that men or angels 
may dwell in those fair cities, but simply to 
delight the eyes that behold them, perhaps 
w^e who, when we at our best would make 
our earth a pattern of the heavens, should 
not lament that a few acres now and then 
resist the ploughshare and the tilling, and 
instead of grain bring forth only bright- 
hued flowers whose colors ape those fleet- 
ing, transient ones that die nightly in the 
sky. 

Just within the precincts of Newington 
they came upon a fine house and grounds. 
This house is painted a bright red, there 
are vines about the piazza, a green lawn, 
a tennis court, a little back from the house 
is a stable with a smart weathercock on 
top. The horseback people were very much 
interested, and stopped a man who was hoe- 
ing in the next field to ask who lived there, 
not that the name would have given the 
slightest amount of information, for the 
person who told them might have been 



75 



mistaken or lied, but it is a peculiarity of 
human nature to put this sort of question. 

** Why, Mr. lives there,'* said the man. 

** I guess everybody in these parts knows 
him, he's the richest man in Newington." 

He spoke with a sort of personal pride in 
his wealthy townsman's existence. 

** I wonder why he doesn't move to Hart- 
ford," said Dolly's rider. '' I should think 
anybody who had such a nice house and 
was able to keep it up in so much style 
would want to come to a city." 

D. smiled. " He'd be a great fool if he 
did. He'd not be the richest man in Hart- 
ford by a long sight, nor would you and I 
be stopping people at their work to ask his 
name, nor would working people answer 
with such an air of friendly participation in 
his glory. He is a wise man who is content 
to be the principal personage in his com- 
munity, wherever that community may be." 



VII 




>HE stable boy who brought 

Worchester to Street for 

Philistina to try him would 
have had them believe that the 
horse had had an adventurous 
career. He came from Kentucky and had 
enjoyed fame and honor. Indeed, from 
what the stable boy retailed, if Worchester 
could talk he would probably have said 
with Ulysses : 

*' Much have I seen and known. 
Cities of men and manners, 
Climates, councils, governments, 
Myself not least, but honored of them all." 

But also like Ulysses he seemed to have 
no craving to tell what he had seen and 
known. There is not a trace of vanity — 
that solvent of reticence — in his steady-go- 
ing gait, and not the smallest boastfulness 
or ostentation ; he is a long, tall, sorrel 
horse, and of a cool and resolute temper. 

''How do you like him, Philistina?" 



77 



asked D. They had gone the length of 
Washington Street and a mile or two down 
the country road on the right before he 
asked this question. D. was riding a new 
horse himself, and Philistina had been ask- 
ing him what he thought of it every five 
minutes since he had mounted it. This lit- 
tle incident is related to show the difference 
between the masculine and the female mind. 
''Well, he isn't Dolly," said Philistina. 
" And, in fact, he isn't a female. Dolly has 
a thousand capricious ways. She jumps at 
holes in the road ; she runs when she is in 
danger of being outstripped ; she trembles 
with excitement ; and she gets depressed 
when she realizes that she is far from home. 
But she knows your mood by instinct ; she 
is sympathetic, sensitive, interesting. Now 
Worchester — well, D., Worchester is like all 
male creation. He goes right along the 
regular road, he gallops if it is a smooth 
piece, and he walks when it is rough. Just 
now when I wanted — for no particular rea- 
son — to ride on the other side of the way, 
he gave his head such a contemptuous 
shake that I expected him every minute 
to say, * Don't be silly, running off at a 



78 



tangent, keep to the beaten track/ Now 
Dolly would have gone over and not only 
enjoyed the variation but understood it. 
The truth is, it's a question of sex. It's his 
penetration in seeing this sort of thing that 
delights me in Howells. Don't you re- 
member in The Quality of Mercy, when Mrs. 
Hillery is warning Louise against Maxwell, 
who had been brought up in another class of 
society, and had other ideas and another 
social code, she says, ' He'd be different 
enough, merely being a man.' " 

D. smiled. '' Her remonstrance, I recol- 
lect, had very little effect. Different as 
they were, Louise preferred him to the 
most faithful reproduction of herself. I 
do not know why it is, Philistina, but this 
cool, bright day makes me melancholy. I 
say I do not know, and yet I do know ; it is 
its autumnal character. It is useless to tell 
me that it is the beginning of July. Such 
days as these are sent to make us remember 
that frost and blight are coming, the leaves 
must change and fall, and ice and snow cover 
the earth. Look at the grass with the yel- 
low tinge, and that bush with the leaves 
turning crimson. Feel this sweet cool 



79 



wind, not cold enough to stir the blood, 
but like the touch of a ghost's fingers. 
Hear the birds in the copse — every note is 
reminiscent. Now nobody ever feels mel- 
ancholy in hot weather. We grumble and 
are uncomfortable, but the very sense of 
discomfort gives a feeling of permanence 
and continuance. We are hot and we al- 
ways shall be hot. It takes all our time to 
exist. We have no prescience for to-mor- 
row except to hope it will come because 
to-day is pretty disagreeable. But an after- 
noon like this, when earth and sky and air 
are bathed in beauty and peace, is also full 
of warning voices. 

' Hence in a season of calm weather, 
Though inward far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
That brought us hither.' 

That's life — you can't get any present out 
of it. You've always got something to re- 
mind you of where you came from or where 
you're going to. What I want is a now, 
and leisure to enjoy it. There is no pleas- 
ure to me in any situation where I am re- 
minded that it is a passing pleasure. The 
only person with whom I ever found my- 



8o 



self in full sympathy in this hatred of 
change and this content with the present is 
a man the Parson was telling me about. 
He was crippled and deaf and half blind, 
and the Parson, after dilating on the joys 
of heaven, asked him if he didn't want to 
go there. ' No,' he said, stoutly. *I don't; 
I know what I got.' The hint of autumn 
in this air is just as melancholy to me as 
the flush of fever in a consumptive's cheek. 
Death is not here to-day, but he is coming — 
surely — for see where he has set his sign." 

" D.," said Philistina, " it may all be true 
that you have said, except that the bird 
songs are reminiscent. If you knew about 
ornithology you'd know that a bird's song 
is an anticipation, and expresses happiness 
or joy only, except when the male bird has 
lost his mate ; then he sings for a few days, 
but whether to make the other birds know 
he is in a position to be consoled, or to try 
to bring her back, you'll have to guess from 
your knowledge of the male nature. For 
me the very sense of its transitoriness gives 
this perfect day an added charm. What are 
the things we care for but the things that 
are rare, and, above all, that we have not 



8i 



got ? You see that in all the poetry. In 
northern countries they sing about the date- 
palm and the orange-trees, and the fragrant 
breath of summer, and in the East it's all 
about water and shade. There's hardly a 
poetical image in the Bible that hasn't got 
something about running waters and shady 
rills ; whenever they wanted to boast about 
.their country, a desire to which the Old 
Testament writers yielded rather often, you 
know, they dilated on the brooks and the 
clear streams and the fountains. Now we, 
who are used to a plenty of water, don't 
compare our lady loves to a spring shut up, 
or a fountain sealed, as Solomon did." 

" I wonder what one of those Old Testa- 
ment Jews, who has never been beyond Jor- 
dan in his life, would say," said D., *' if he 
could be transported to this green lane after 
all his bragging about his mud holes and 
his land of milk and honey, two-thirds of 
which is a desert of limestone rocks and 
ledges, whitish-gray glaring in the sun, the 
stones wasted by age, relieved with little 
scrubby trees, unrejoiced by a single blade 
of grass, and barren to the extent that the 
most industrious bird couldn't collect in 

6 



82 



its length and breadth enough material to 
make a nest. Would he burst into a sub- 
lime canticle at the sight of this luxuriant 
verdure, or be angry because there are 
places more beautiful than Jerusalem, the 
joy of the whole earth ? One of the queer 
things in this world is the effect Palestine 
has on ministers of the gospel. They come, 
many of them, from cold countries, and they 
are fascinated with the idea of a land they 
have Scriptural authority for believing is a 
land of vines and olives and palms, of soft 
skies, and no danger of throat trouble. Of 
course they pitch their tents, like the rest 
of us, amid Moslem squalor, barrenness, 
and within the circuit of icy winds. But 
there is this to be said for them, they never 
betray their disillusion about the Brook 
Cherith, or the site of Jericho, or the ashy 
soil on which the Jews looked from the 
mountains of Moab, and wept when they 
remembered Zion. The faith in the desira- 
bility of Palestine will never die out as long 
as clergymen go there and have it to preach 
about from the time they return till their 
retirement." 

With that barren land in mind, it did 



83 



seem a pleasant country when they turned 
into the New Haven turnpike, a white road 
bordered by trees. The landscape gradu- 
ally closed about them, they heard the cat- 
tle ripping off the lush grass in the fields, 
and the rattle of the mowing-machine. 

Now and again they came to little pools 
where small fish leaped, rippling on the sur- 
face in ever widening circles ; the mirror of 
the water was broken by tall knots of irises 
and bullrushes or a floating layer of lily 
leaves. The sunlight, as it fell upon the 
ferns and the grasses of the slopes, blended 
their several tints of lilac, russet, red, yel- 
low, and the varied greens into a harmo- 
nious radiance. On the wooded slope the 
glossy bronze -red leaves of the beech 
showed bravely against the green of the 
chestnuts and their hanging white sprays. 
Spenser hit on an apt phrase when he called 
this muscular, stalwart tree ''the warlike 
beech." 

They met a turtle in the road, his back 
covered with the fragments of green leaves 
blown off in yesterday's storm. He was 
walking along seemingly indifferent to the 
loveliness of the day and the scenery till the 



84 



sight or the sound of the horseback riders 
made him pause and draw in his head. D. 
took this for a sign that he did not admire 
their appearance, and wanted to get down 
and in vengeance mark his back with the 
date 10,000 B.C., and so upset the idea of 
the Biblical chronology, but was deterred 
by the presence of two little boys sitting 
on the fence, innocent of latter-day scep- 
ticism and stockings. He said the mud- 
turtle reminded him of a horse he once rode 
going down to Jericho, whose prototype was 
the Emperor Honorius, whom Gibbon de- 
scribed as without passions and therefore 
without talents. 

Of birds and flowers they noted little 
change since last week, except that the 
meadow-lilies had grown to maturity, and 
they came upon stately clumps of wood- 
lilies growing between the stumps of fallen 
trees. The ferns were big and lusty, with 
red seeds powdering the ridge of the fronds, 
and corn poppies, coreopsis, and red flags 
flaunting their freckled faces, grew on the 
road-side. Of birds, the valley-thrush sang 
its simple flute-like song, but the robbins had 
lost their pure piercing notes and sputtered 



85 



like hoarse stammerers. The care of the 
young of any species leaves little room for 
the practice of the fine arts — the woods are 
full of young fledglings their parents are 
scolding into the mystery of how to fly. 
The heat and blaze of midsummer also si- 
lence many of our birds. 

They turned out of the New Haven Road 
at a sort of fork, skirted the edge of a deep 
wood^on the hill-side, and rode along a path 
too narrow for two to go — abreast, a cool 
dim path as restful as solitude. 

Suddenly D. stopped and parted the 
branches of a spreading oak. They looked 
down into a green basin framed in blue. In 
the centre Hartford lay ; they saw the 
gleam of the white and red houses, and the 
tall church-spires, and the gold dome of the 
capitol. A dark and glossy background of 
green spread to the foot of the mountains 
that seemed to float down in billowy waves 
to meet it. That stretch of blue, as pene- 
trating as a ray of light flashed in a dark 
room, seemed to liberate them from earth. 
The river meadows looking towards the 
light glowed or darkened as the clouds float- 
ing over them separated in flaming masses, 



86 



or grew black in heavy blocks. From the 
hill they saw their great shadows pass slow- 
ly over the top of the green forest. 

" If we had any such historical association 
this would be as beautiful as a view of 
Rome from the Villa D'Este," said Philis- 
tina. 

D. turned right about in a manner which 
would have been agitating to Dolly, but 
was received by Worchester with phleg- 
matic indifference as all being in a day's 
work. 

*' No historical association, indeed ! Will 
you tell me why the Pequot War and Cap- 
tain John Mason, of Windsor, are not as 
much matters of history as the fights be- 
tween the Sabines and the Romans ? Or 
these paths, trod by the men who origi- 
nated this government of the people, by the 
people, for the people, are not as sacred as 
the walks traversed by Cicero ? There is 
one point of resemblance, however, I grant 
you, which makes the view of Hartford as 
interesting as that of Rome. Both are 
drained into their own rivers. Let us go 
home." 



VIII 




' ARDON my whispering, read- 
er, but the habit has taken 
fast hold. Philistina has been 
buying a horse, and the affair 
has been conducted with so 
much secrecy and so much diplomacy that 
loud speech has not been indulged in dur- 
ing the negotiation. 

The first thing one has to learn when one 
goes into the horse business is to assume an 
air of indifference. No matter if horseback 
riding is the one essential to your health, 
no matter if your ambition to ride or love of 
the exercise renders the thought of a horse- 
less existence insupportable, conceal your 
real emotion. What you have got to fight 
in the man who sells you your horse is a 
cool reluctance to enter into business rela- 
tions with you. He'd like to have you have 
the horse. He likes you, likes the way you 
talk, likes your looks. If he was not a 
plain man and no flatterer he'd say he'd 



rather you have the horse than anybody he 
ever knew on so short an acquaintance. 
But there's a little matter between him and 
a lady over to Willimantic. She's that set 
on the horse that he'd hardly take the re- 
sponsibility of disappointing her. But then 
she hasn't got the figure for it. You've got 
to have a fine, straight figure to look well 
on a horse, and the Willimantic lady — well, 
if a man could be excused for plain speech, 
is a trifle stout, and he has to own he likes 
a good horse to have a — well, a handsome 
appearing rider. Now if that Willimantic 
lady could be satisfied — Oh, Philistina, 
with what weapons will you fight such sub- 
tle, subtle flattery ! 

The fact is, all horse sales are conducted 
in Oriental fashion. No hurry, plenty of 
graceful compliments, and cool indifference 
on both sides. 

Philistina's horse was finally chosen on 
account of its simple and open past, and 
its almost haughty acknowledgment of a 
dearth of social pretension. 

Almost every horse that is for sale is a 
blooded horse from Kentucky, and has tak- 
en the prize at the Illinois State fair. 



89 



If he balks, it is insisted that balking is 
an aristocratic tendency. Does he shy, it 
is a direct inheritance from his great-grand- 
father, the famous racer. Run — that's the 
blood. His very faults, like those of Emer- 
son's good man, illustrated by the wounded 
oyster who mended his shell with pearl, 
work to his advantage. His exaggerated 
head occasions the same sort of pride as 
the Hapsburg lips ; his stocky legs, as the 
Guelf peculiarity of being short and fat, or 
of the Dobson family's light hair and eyes. 
If he " picks his feet," or shies or bucks, the 
dealer has the same impartial air of sweet 
reasonableness in his reply: "I never said 
he was a rocking-chair, and I disown him 
to be a Texas mustang. He is a blooded 
Kentucky horse, and he had the medal at 
the Illinois State fair." 

" Bring me a mustang," at last cried Phil- 
istina, with angry insistence, goaded to this 
act by the same thing that has made her 
rejoice in her peasant forefathers when peo- 
ple bragged of the gout, and the mustang 
was forthcoming and the bargain com- 
pleted. 

Well, now that the long struggle is over, 



go 



what of it? He is safe and sound in the 
stable. Sound ? — stay — 

There is a freemasonry between horse peo- 
ple. Philistina found this out when, seeing 
an advertisement in a paper, she went to 
a neighboring city to look at a horse. The 
horse proved to be blind of an eye. She had 
provided herself with an adviser in the per- 
son of another horseman, who was to judge 
of defects, and when she turned to him to 
corroborate her statement that a missing 
eye was an awkward blemish, what was 
her surprise to hear from her own lawyer, 
" Why, I can't say, marm, as I look at it that 
way. Horses — blooded horses, which ain't 
rocking-chairs nor yet mustangs, are al- 
ways shying at something in the road, and 
if he is off of an eye, he ain't got but one 
side to shy from." 

When, therefore, the horse she finally se- 
lected, fresh from the Texas plains, was real- 
ly hers, she looked with gratification at the 
long nine of stablemen from half a mile 
around, who filed into the stable to see the 
new purchase, and, of course, to praise it. 
But circumstances were changed. Every 
livery - stable owner, every shock - headed 



9' 



groom had his word. The acumen with 
which defects were detected showed merci- 
less if penetrating gaze. 

Like all shallow criticism and would-be 
popular criticism, there was no delicate and 
discriminating praise.. It is much easier to 
be vulgarly smart and ill-natured than gen- 
erous and just, thought Philistina when it 
had been suggested that his ankles were a 
trifle swelled and there was a smallish lump 
on his knee, and his back was a ''leetle 
round for a saddle." What a pity that more 
substantial comfort cannot be extracted 
from discriminating observation. 

But to horse. 

Philistina had been brought up in a pious 
if humble way. She had been taught from 
youth that while beauty is a fading flower, 
homeliness is guaranteed to last a lifetime, 
Therefore, as she bought her horse for his 
staying capacities, she avoided the snare of 
good looks. The Texas free-lance had lately 
been in distressed circumstances, and the red 
and white hairs on his mottled body were 
so worn that when Philistina demanded 
a name for him D.'s immediate response 
" Esau " looked like an inspiration. As has 



92 



been remarked, Philistina bought Esau on 
account of his democratic birth ; the only 
record of who he is and whence he came is 
branded in huge letters on his side. " The 
cowboys got really mortified," explained D., 
" because they kept hanging men for steal- 
ing their own horses; so they reorganized 
the brands, and not only required owners to 
put their initial but their initials on." Esau's 
master, according to this, must have been 
a Spanish hidalgo, for his name stretches 
the length of his body. For the rest, it 
may be said that he has the adaptability of 
the American character. He settled him- 
self — he, the denizen of the prairie, the 
product of the steppes — in his new habita- 
tion, a New England stable, with a calmness 
that commanded admiration. Fear does not 
appear to enter his breast, nor is he daunted 
by captivity. He seems, indeed, to be of 
the school of ascetic Brahmins, and appar- 
ently to regard fate as invincible. 

" We'll take him out after dinner for the 
first time," said D. " It's so hot he'll not be 
noticed, anyway, but it's just as well to have 
the friendly cover of night." 

This remark is noted because it is one of 



93 



D.'s boasts that he is indifferent to public 
opinion, but the truth is he is one of those 
people who has so persistently condemned 
certain weaknesses in others that he has 
acquired the reputation of freedom from 
these weaknesses, and with freedom, liberty 
to indulge in them. In consideration of his 
feelings, therefore, Philistina turned into a 
side street and made in the direction of 
Bloomfield. 

The patient souls who have so long fol- 
lowed the horseback riders will follow them 
again, perhaps, in the cool of evening. The 
western sky was amber, and the far re- 
treated thunder -clouds hung low in the 
north, emitting quick flashes which revealed 
their forms. They rode by Little River, 
whose smooth surface reflected two shades 
of light, one from the water, the other from 
the lily pads which bordered it on both 
sides. The dew was falling, and the smell 
of new-mown hay scented the air. The lit- 
tle lane, bordered by trees, looked like the 
entrance of a moonlit causeway where the 
light was reflected from the glistening leaves 
and the liquid shade beneath bounded and 
narrowed the road. They heard the bull- 



frogs down in the meadow trumpeting with 
a dull, thumping sound, and the whinny of 
a horse in a distant pasture, and the barking 
of dogs. With these noises were mingled — 
subordinating them by its persistence — the 
gurgle of unwearied water. Things looked 
large and out of proportion in the half-moon- 
light. The gray rocks across the road might 
have been sleeping elephants. Esau's small, 
thin figure assumed gigantic proportions. 
Philistina trembled when she thought of what 
a fall she'd get should he take a notion to 
throw her at that moment when he was tall- 
er than Worchester with his head in the air. 

And his gait ? 

Even thus early in their acquaintance 
Philistina was able to glory in his ambition 
and that quality which is best described in 
the popular tongue as *'sand." 

Unlike Shelley at Naples, who would ** lie 
down like a tired child and weep away this 
life of care," he held up his Hapsburg lip 
and trotted on. With no such self-pity as 
wrung from Burns the cry, 

" Thou art a galling load 
Along a rough, a weary road 
To wretches such as I ;" 



95 



did he skirt nimbly the outskirts of Asylum 
Avenue, face the unfamiliar bicycle, and re- 
gard with unabashed front the mysterious 
street -car. In his code of manners it is 
evidently bad form to be surprised. 

'' D.," said Philistina, in that dispassionate 
tone she has acquired from her associates 
of the stable-yard, " Esau looks like a don- 
key and he runs like one. But I am going 
to apply your wisdom, an act which you 
have left to me to do. What we look like 
really does not signify so we are comfortable 
and happy. People who like me now will 
like me just as much, though on Esau's back 
I do present a somewhat absurd appearance. 
Those who do not like me will be softened 
to me by my insignificance. For a long 
time I wore strings to my bonnets and high 
collars in hot weather, and I suffered many 
other discomforts in cold, for the sake of 
appearing well. I do not think anybody 
ever cated a straw about these sacrifices, 
or that I ever gained or lost a friend by 
them. I like Esau, and I am going to ride 
him in the broad light of day." 

*' Philistina," said D., "you ought to be 
the heroine of a novel. I am sure you'd be 



96 



immensely popular. You know people like 
renunciation — that is, they like to see it in 
other people, and you always have the air 
of having arrived to your great height of 
moral excellence by self-sacrifice. I saw 
you liked that little beast, or, rather, I saw 
that you had made up your mind to think 
you liked him, because he was the choice of 
your unassisted judgment ; but I was won- 
dering how you were going to make some- 
thing magnificent out of it." 

" D.," said Philistina, ** if I were a man I 
would not employ sarcasm against a woman. 
Besides, it deceives nobody. Those who 
are wittiest at our expense are most infatu- 
ated about us." 

D. took a short cut for Street. 

*' Summer evenings' sights and sounds 
make me lonesome," he said, "and home- 
sick, even though we are only a mile off. 
You are always talking of what you would 
do if you were a man, but if men did any of 
the things women think they would do in 
their places, this world would be even more 
impossible than it is now." 




IX 

S AU is afraid of chickens. Nay, 
do not start, reader, nor per- 
mit contemptuous scorn of his 
^BM^{W timidity to turn your heart 
^^..— ^e.\3~^^....^. against this stranger in your 
midst. Rather let the phenomenon set you 
to thinking. If an ignorant peasant in a 
remote Itahan village can divine from a bit 
of wood-carving not larger than your two 
hands the design of the altar screen and 
stalls of the Ovieto Cathedral, and from 
that hint restore the elaborate work of a 
by-gone age in its entirety, surely you, from 
the simple fact that the domestic hen has it 
in her power to agitate and even terrify a 
horse fourteen and a half hands high, may 
reconstruct his past. 

And while we are about it, here are other 
confidences. Esau is afraid of chickens and 
of churches, and of his own spare figure 
and elongated head, when he sees them in 
a pool of water. 



98 



As the clergymen say, let us reason to- 
gether ; when we set out to unravel a mystery 
let us seize the first thread and hold on 
to it. 

Why is he afraid of hens, churches, and 
his own not unusual personality ? 

Because they are strange to him. 

What part of the world could he have 
dwelt in that such commonplace objects 
should strike terror to his heart ? 

1 confess, reader, that I am making a 
mystery where there is no mystery, again 
following the example of my betters. We 
all know Esau is a Texas mustang, but 
these traits, so naively exhibited, give us 
the same pleasure when we recognize them 
that a whist-player with the odd trick to 
his credit derives in talking over the game. 
There are no chickens except prairie-chick- 
ens, who are not chickens, on the Texas 
prairie ; there are no churches there to cast 
long shadows on the ground, and in that 
broad expanse no shallow pools in which 
Esau might have beheld and fallen in love 
with his own features. If there were not 
already enough of pathos in life we might 
afford to linger over this little tragedy and 



99 



drop a tear. I said Esau was afraid of him- 
self. Was it fear alone ? May it not have 
been grief, disappointment, wounded vanity 
as well ? Who knows but that until that 
view of his spare form yesterday afternoon 
he had not cherished the illusion that he 
was an Adonis among horses — that he may 
not have plumed himself on his imag- 
inary grace and beauty, comparing his 
charms with those of other steeds and 
secretly rejoicing in his own superior 
merits ? 

Well, whatever his theories in the past 
the mirror has done its work of disillusion. 
I do not know what effect it will have upon 
his character. Sadness rather than bitter- 
ness will probably fall upon his life, for 
Esau has a gentle heart, but in making you 
this confidence concerning him I do not 
fear that I have done amiss. None of us 
can ever forget the moment when the veil 
was lifted in our own lives and we saw our- 
selves for the first time as we really are. 
In that hour of self-revelation our little as- 
sumptions of superiority, our small vanities 
were not only exhibited with unsparing 
candor, but, as we afterwards learn to be- 



lieve, with exaggerated distinctness. The 
impression remains clear-cut and vivid in 
our consciousness, so vivid that I feel I need 
no more apologize for Esau's personal de- 
fects, now that he is conscious of them and 
deplores them. We have all suffered the 
same disillusioning process, and we are 
united to him by the tie of sympathy. 

Philistina has been riding alone; it would 
not have been alone if she had ridden Dol- 
ly. There are people who do not talk who 
are very pleasantly felt, but Esau is not re- 
sponsive. She rode towards Farmington 
yesterday afternoon, and after she was re- 
mote from cities and men she turned 
into a country road lined on either side 
with golden-rod. It was their first sight of 
this autumnal flower, this signal of the go- 
ing of summer, and Philistina drew rein 
and looked at it with a melancholy interest, 
and so pervaded was she with sadness at 
the thought (borrowed from D.'s note-book) 
of how small a part of time they share who 
are so wondrous bright and fair that she 
sighed aloud. Esau, who the moment 
his pace was slackened began to eat grass, 
looked up, and though I will not affirm 



that he said anything, his glance of inquiry 
was so plainly, " What did you do that for ?'* 
that Philistina realized his sex and went to 
explaining. 

" I don't really care about golden-rod, 
Esau," she said. " I consider it a very much 
over-praised flower. It has a disagreeable 
odor in the first place, and that yellow green 
never appealed to me. I sentimentalized 
about it because all the artists and the poets 
make it a subject of romance. When I get 
time, Esau, I am going to write an essay on 
the value of individual opinion, which will 
— will probably occasion the writing of 
other essays to refute me. That is really 
all the influence one has in essay writing 
nowadays. We are very odd creatures, we 
mortals, and not very different from the 
people who hunted the Snark or went off to 
sea with the Teapot and The Quangle Wan- 
gle. We look at a nickel before taking it 
or passing it lest it prove false, but we never 
dream of doing so much by our opinions, 
but accept them and pass them on, false or 
true, as may happen. There is nothing 
more astonishing than the way we let other 
people decide whether a thing is to us beau- 



tiful or unsightly. Now, there is no beauty 
except a subjective beauty, just as there is 
no reasoning a man into being good except 
by giving him a sense within himself of the 
beauty of goodness. These things rest in 
our own souls, the standard is set within 
ourselves." 

Did Esau understand or care ? If he did 
not, Philistina was not worse off than other 
preachers to any Sunday morning audience. 

An old tar would have described yester- 
day as "quiet weather;" the sky wrapped 
itself in masses of woolly white clouds, the 
blue line of the hills as evening came on 
grew to beaten steel, and where a band of 
purple sank into a rosy mist, a thin gray 
veil was overspread and tempered the color 
to a misty harmony. Hartford was buried 
down there in the hollow of the green trees. 
Philistina looked back, and looking back 
she also looked into the coming years. So 
shall we one day behold life, as if we stood 
upon a high hill and it was a little village 
below where we had rested a while. And 
from the hill we can see the paths and turns, 
the stretch of sun, the steep ascent, the 
pleasant valley. What was obscure, is clear 



103 



and plain, now we view it from a height. 
And the village which, small as it was. was 
yet so large that we were lost in it, unknown 
and undesired, what a little place to work 
and puzzle in ! No wonder it was meant 
just for a station of a day now we have 
come to this — to this ! 

They turned into the woods, and suddenly 
the silence of the fields was broken by the 
crickets singing in the grass. They made 
as much noise as a colony of blackbirds. 
The clear ring in their creak tells just as 
plainly as the golden-rod that we are on 
the heels of autumn. 

Philistina thought until she began these 
horseback rides that she knew something 
of wild flowers, but every day she brings 
back an unfamiliar species, which she and 
the botany books are set to the task of 
naming. 

Yesterday she found butter-and-eggs, toad- 
flax, johnswort, prunella, cool in the grass, 
snake-mouthed arethusa, and countless va- 
rieties of asters. Seeing them growing in 
such grace and beauty and a certain fragile 
delicacy and loveliness in the fields, made 
her long to take them home, and she won- 



dered why people cultivated flowers when 
every meadow and fence corner yield 
grasses and blossoms that for form and 
color (that is, a certain tender, spiritual 
quality of hue) put the greenhouse and 
garden plants to shame. She found out 
why when she had got them arranged in 
vases. All the tender blues and lavenders 
faded, the slender grasses drooped, the 
green things paled and withered. You 
can no more expect a mass of field flowers 
to adapt themselves to a Sevres vase than 
you can expect Pocahontas to look beauti- 
ful in a London gown. Take things from 
their native environment and you rob them 
of their charm. In fact, environment is so 
much an element of beauty that they can- 
not be judged apart. Who would have the 
''Venus of Milo " in her living-room? It is 
not so, however, with a mental or a moral 
quality, which is always independently 
beautiful and desirable. Love nature as 
we will, in matters like these we see how 
infinitely higher is the spiritual world. 

When they came out of the wood they 
met a young girl walking with a person 
who, in their romantic mood, Esau and 



Philistina decided must be her young man. 
She was a sHght, dark girl, and she had on 
. a white dress. At the fence corner she 
stopped and gathered a bunch of golden- 
rod and pinned it on her shoulder. The 
gold of the flower brought out the warmth 
and richness of her dark cheek. It glowed 
to beauty. I don't suppose she gave herself 
a thought about the responsibility of this 
act. How many women consider that on the 
slender thread of their personal attractions 
hangs the very existence of a human future. 
Philistina was reading Herbert Spencer 
the other day, and she came to the conclu- 
sion that the tie of a ribbon, the arrange- 
ment of a waving lock which has swayed 
the choice of a doubting gallant, is one of 
the most serious things in life, because that 
pinch of the curling- iron, or turn of the 
milliner's fingers gives a race to the world 
which otherwise never would have ex- 
isted. 

And was this solitary ride altogether en- 
joyable ? At least, she thought her own 
thoughts and spoke her own words without 
contradiction or ridicule ; but when a wom- 
an talks, and a man does not say anything, 



io6 



she cannot be sure that his silence is all ad- 
miration. Esau may have been entirely 
disapproving had he the means to commu- 
nicate his thoughts. 



X 




?):r^(^.(^ HESE horseback rides around 
Hartford were all very well, 
but they were really meant as 
a preparation for a journey 
D. and Philistina had long 
planned to take. When, finally, the day 
arrived, they started in fine feather, Esau 
leading the way. They had talked horse 
and horseback trip right along for two 
months, and had made plans and unmade 
them, and it is not complained that friends 
or neighbors were lacking in either sympa- 
thy or advice. 

For many a day before they set out peo- 
ple used to come to see them and tell them 
where to go, and make out routes for them, 
and give them hints as to the care of their 
horses. If they had taken all the advice 
they got they'd have spent the first night at 
seven different places — namely, Farmington 
and Simsbury and Avon and New Hartford, 
Collinsville, Barkhamsted Light-house, and 



io8 



Riverton. If they'd pleased everybody they 'd 
have strapped their packs in front of the 
saddle, at the left side, the right, the back, 
and they'd have had a dozen styles of bags. 
They'd have fed Esau all the way from 
three to twelve quarts of oats a day, and 
washed his back at night with electric oil, hot- 
water, cold-water, alcohol, Pond's extract, 
whiskey-and-water, and Lubin's cologne. 

If those people had taken all the warn- 
ings they got, they wouldn't have stirred 
outside their front door, or would have 
given themselves up for broken -necked, 
crippled, maimed ; but if they had stayed 
at home they'd have had to encounter the 
counter-current of derision for missing such 
a good time because they didn't go. Friends 
— enemies maybe — told them August was 
the month for the trip, Berkshire the coun- 
try to ride through on horseback. 

Dear, dear, what a task to try to please 
everybody, everybody going different ways. 

Like most people, they pleased them- 
selves, and at eleven o'clock of a Wednes- 
day morning they cantered out of Forest 
Street, all the sidewalk lined with neigh- 
bors and friends waving adieu. 



log 



Stay, no more than they, can the reader 
of this chronicle start off without delays. 

Every arrangement had been completed 
the night before. There were three horses 
and three people to go : Diana, who was a 
city friend of theirs and Philistina's men- 
tor, Philistina and D., Sunday, Esau, and 
Jack the Sailor. 

Sunday is a New Yorker, a bob - tailed, 
high-stepping bay ; Esau has already oc- 
cupied space in these pages ; Jack is an 
aristocratic and handsome saddle-horse. D. 
and Philistina bought their beasts for econ- 
omy's sake, expecting to make the expenses 
of the trip in reselling them. The people 
they bought them from advised them in the 
most disinterested manner to take this far- 
sighted policy. 

They got up long before day : this was to 
please the neighbors, who told them they 
must start before it got hot, but it is one 
thing to get ready and another to be ready. 
The women were all dressed, bonneted and 
gloved, and trembling with excitement by 
six o'clock. Then they had to sit down 
while Diana read aloud Emerson on '' Self 
Control " for Philistina's discipline. 



It was on account of D. He had been 
spurring up everybody within a radius of 
five miles to get ready, whether they were 
going or not, and prognosticating that two 
women would never be able to leave the 
house till the day after they said they would, 
when suddenly, at the last moment, he dis- 
covered he had things to do. 

He shut himself up in a room, admitting 
only male visitors, one at a time. He prob- 
ably wrote the President's inaugural for him 
during these long hours ; perhaps he learned 
the Meisterschaff system of speaking Ger- 
man, he had plenty of time to do both. 

Day broke, boiled, sizzed, Philistina fret- 
ted, and Diana looked gratified. " They are 
all alike," she said ; " all men are inconsist- 
ent and childish. Now, Philistina, I want 
you to be a woman." 

'* Dear me, Diana," said Philistina, " that's 
easy enough. I knew you were rather ex- 
acting, and I thought you expected me to 
be a man." 

"A man, indeed !" said Diana, looking at 
her bracelet watch. **You don't imagine 
I'd take the responsibility of going on a 
horseback tour with two of them, do you ?" 



" But what do you suppose he is doing?" 
questioned Philistina. 

"Doing? Why, trying on his clothes," 
said Diana, promptly. ** People who know 
them — wives and mothers, you know — tell 
me when they shut themselves up that's 
what they are always doing. I'm glad, Phil- 
istina, you don't care what you look like." 

Philistina moved a little uneasily. She 
had on a riding -skirt, a linen shirt, and a 
soft felt hat. It was a trying costume, but 
she had hoped it was becoming, as people 
generally do, no matter what liberties they 
take with their appearance. 

*' You look as if you cared enough for 
what you * look like,' " she said, a little bit- 
terly, for Diana wore one of the great Bon 
Ton's habits, and was very taut and elegant 
in her equestrian array, but she looked 
down and smiled with contemptuous indif- 
ference on her slim figure. 

" I get myself into what they send me, and 
that's the end of it," she said. "Don't put 
on a veil, Philistina, it looks vain. Women 
used to do those affected things, but we 
know better now ; and do keep in mind that 
you have got to be an example." 



With counsels like these, the moments, 
sandwiched with philosophy, were whiled 
away. D. came down at eleven o'clock ; 
they did mount, did start, and finally got 
on the road. 

It is just as well to put on record here 
that bets on Esau, as the favorite, were 
large and universal. He was so plain, so 
unassuming, that he carried a certificate of 
good standing in his every attitude. 

"The little fellow'll outlast the lot," were 
the last cheering words that echoed from 
the last neighbor's stable, as Philistina can- 
tered out of sight of home amid parting di- 
rections. 

It was a hot day, but the sun was veiled 
with a thin cloud of haze that hinted at 
coming drouth and dustiness rather than 
rain. The summer greenness, after they 
got into the country, was just beginning to 
change into russet, yellow, and scarlet tints. 
Holiday time had come to the growing 
plants. The tiny village of Avon was to be 
their first stopping-place for lunch. Esau 
led the way, for three horses cannot go 
abreast, and that bold spirit, incased in a 
small, unsightly frame, was Columbustian 



in its pioneer qualities. The big horses' 
long walk was too much for him, but his 
unbroken single-foot put them in the rear. 
They got to Avon in two hours, lunched 
there, and started at about 4 p.m. for New 
Hartford. 

A word about roads. The people in Avon 
are an intelligent and kindly race. They 
always vote the straight ticket, but they 
cannot tell the passing traveller how to get 
anywhere. 

It was this way. New Hartford was the 
nearest stopping -place for the night, but 
they must avoid the railroad if possible, and 
the thing v/as to get a country path undis- 
turbed by trains. 

They went over to the store, where half 
a dozen men, middle-aged and aged, were 
settling the affairs of state by discussion, 
and asked a way to New Hartford that 
avoided the railroad. 

" Well, you go up the road a piece," said 
one man, ''and look at the sign-board, and 
then turn to the right and go two miles, and 
that brings you to the Devil's passway— two 
miles close to the track over the river on 
the other side." 

8 



114 



" But we want to avoid that," said D., 
very slowly and calmly. " We want to get 
to New Hartford without riding longside 
the track." 

" Then you go to the next village and turn 
to the right," said an aged man with a quid 
of tobacco in his mouth, "and go down a 
piece on the left, and you'll come to the 
Devil's passway, and you go along that two 
miles and then — " 

"That's what I want to avoid," said D. 
He looked red and talked very loud, as if 
his auditor was deaf. 

Philistina knew the signs and proposed to 
take a walk, but Diana opened her reticule 
and took out three small pellets. 

" For violent excitement," she read the 
directions in a low but clear voice, " take 
one of No. 3. For increased ditto, threat- 
ening apoplexy, one of No. 7. You must give 
them to him, Philistina, they are a specific; 
but watch your chance. I despise tact, but 
that is the way we will have to begin." 

Philistina nodded. Already she divined 
that it was best to agree to propositions if 
not to carrying them out. 

A tall man with his beard cut away under 



115 



his chin, leaving mouth and cheeks bare, now 
took his feet from the topmost round of the 
porch where they had doubtless obstructed 
the view, and, without looking at D., re- 
marked to his neighbor, 

*' He might go through Barkhamsted 
Light-house. It's six miles out of the way 
on an awful piece of road, but if he's a mind 
to get away from the cars that'll do it/* 

The individual addressed laughed. 

" Barkhamsted Light-house 's clean out of 
the world," he said ; *' it's about the farthest 
place you ever got ; but if he's hunting sce- 
nery, I guess he'll get it going over them 
hills." 

" It looks to me as if you people were 
pretty good-natured," said D., "to let the 
railroad run longside your highway two 
miles, and the same highway be crossed 
three times by the track between here and 
New Hartford ; it kills a lot of people and 
frightens a lot of horses ; but as you could 
help it if you wanted to, I suppose it's all 
right." 

This sarcastic comment was made after 
they had mounted their horses, for the Avon 
people are doubtless like the rest of the 



ii6 



world, they prefer their own inconveniences 
to other people's comforts, and there was a 
plenty of opportunity to make the same 
remark about the railroad before the horse- 
back party got through their trip. 

There is no use in trying to make anoth- 
er person understand about that afternoon, 
for there really never was or never will be 
another just like it, though the same remark 
can be made about any afternoon in the 
year, for Nature never repeats herself ; there 
will be a different setting of the clouds, 
darker or lighter shadows on the green 
slopes, a changing glory in the sky. 

But it was nearing five o'clock, and no 
Barkhamsted Light-house in view. When 
we in our short-sightedness fret at little in- 
terruptions, we would do well to remember 
that most of the good things that happen to 
us come about through some accidental, per- 
haps unwelcome, circumstance. Philistina 
and Esau both wanted to drink, and, though 
D. and Diana were cross at having to stop, 
stop they did at a pretty brick house by the 
river-side, where there was a stone trough 
and a well-sweep and a pleasant-faced man 
digging potatoes in his garden. 



" Do you know any way we can get to 
New Hartford without going through the 
Devil's passway?" asked PhiHstina, after he 
had given her a drink out of a cool gourd. 

She knew that her persistent habit of ask- 
ing questions was ill-bred and childish, but 
the individual who is unencumbered with 
a reputation for good sense or good man- 
ners has acquired liberty. 

"We are going through Barkhamsted 
Light-house," said D., decisively. " Philis- 
tina, I wish you wouldn't — " 

"You'll go six miles out of your way if 
you do," said the man, " and I can show 
you a way through Nigger Hill that's a 
chance better. There's a track to cross, 
and the freight trains — well, we can't 
count on when they won't come ; but you'll 
have to cross tracks no matter where you 
go. That's a strange idea you've got about 
Barkhamsted Light-house." 

" Six men at Avon told me," said D. 

The man shook his head. 

" Them town people," he said, contemptu- 
ously — but Philistina, wise in her day, did 
not even smile. 

The new way proved very pleasant. 



n8 



Nigger Hill, despite its unromantic name, 
is a picturesque ascent, and looking from its 
height there are strips of meadow-land and 
a line of blue hills, with stretches of pine 
and beech forest. They went well into the 
woods after that and began to climb. The 
sun shone in long rays of gold through the 
thick foliage, and the birds were chattering 
as if in consultation as to where to spend 
the winter. How glad the horseback riders 
were that they had done talking over plans 
to go away. The Farmington River ran 
swiftly in its rocky bed beneath ; they saw 
it gleam through a thicket of young pitch- 
pines and white birches that grew from the 
hill-side to its banks, and above all the 
wood noises they heard its continuous mur- 
mur. It was like a human voice, and took 
away all sense of loneliness. I mean the 
loneliness that oppresses the heart and 
makes one feel the irresponsiveness of Nat- 
ure. It is difficult in these days of scep- 
ticism to make any statement that will not 
be controverted, but I think the people 
who live by rivers are much more cheer- 
ful than those who dwell on mountain 
heights or in parts of the country distant 



119 



from flowing streams. There is a sense of 
companionship in the ripple of the waves 
and of communication with the world in 
the flow of the water, and the people who 
live by rivers are not remote from the busy 
scenes of life, for the river flowing to the 
sea bears the spirit of the dweller by its 
side upon its breast to the remotest shores. 

'* Now," said D., when they came to a great 
stone trough covered with moss and half 
buried in ferns, whose clear waters flowed 
from a thicket of sweet fern and fringed 
orchids, "aren't you sorry you and Esau 
took your drink down in the meadow in- 
stead of waiting for this .^" 

Philistina might have said if she had not 
taken her drink in the meadow D. would 
not have taken his here ; but she chose a 
better way, both she and Esau drank again 
undisturbed by past libations. 

" He is the toughest little fellow I know," 
said D., after a somewhat difficult ascent 
of the mountain, when they came in sight 
of New Hartford. Philistina smiled con- 
tentedly, ** He could not be so plain for 
nothing," she said, with the wisdom of ex- 
perience. 



XI 




HEY would have got to New 
Hartford hours before if it 
had not been for Esau's ap- 
petite. Whether he inherited 
the pecuharities of his great 
namesake or only imitated them I do not 
know ; at any rate, there was a strange 
likeness between them, and an almost un- 
canny appropriateness in the appellation 
Esau. 

Esau was not, it is true, tempted to barter 
his birthright for a mess of pottage, but I 
am sure he would any day have sold his 
good name, graven in so elaborate a fash- 
ion along the length of his body, for a 
mouthful of grass ; for although he had 
eaten with enthusiasm at 7 a.m., and with 
rapture at i P. M., of all the delicacies 
included in a horse's bill of fare, by five 
o'clock he began to seek refreshments in 
every fence corner and along the grassy 
road, and stop and browse he would, though 



Philistina coaxed and urged and finally ap- 
plied her thread of a whip to his back. Not 
an inch would he stir, as indifferent to tears 
and prayers as a marble bust of Pallas. 

Whenever these stoppages occurred, D. 
would call out in stentorian tones : ** Why 
don't you come on, Philistina ?" and wait 
for a reply, although the reason of her tar- 
rying was as obvious to him as to her. 

" What do you suppose men always ask 
you why for, when they know just as well as 
you do, Diana ?" queried Philistina, when 
Esau and Sunday next rode abreast. 

" Oh, it is simply the old tyrannical nature 
asserting itself," said Diana. " They require 
either a reason or an excuse, on the prin- 
cipal that some people consider a lie from 
an inferior an apology." 

It was in front of a small white house 
with green blinds that Esau next paused 
for refreshments, the grass growing thick 
and green from the edge of the road to the 
little rail-fence. A lady was sitting on the 
porch making a worsted antimacassar by the 
light of the mackerel sky, and it would have 
seemed to a looker-on that her innocent 
and primitive employment would have put 



her in sympathy with the simple bucolic 
pair. What, then, was Philistina's surprise 
when she heard, in a distinct though sweet 
and even tone, "I don't suppose father 'd 
object." 

** I beg your pardon," said Philistina, be- 
wildered. 

*' I don't suppose^' a little doubtfully, ** fa- 
ther 'd object. You see that is rightly his 
grass your horse is eating. I don't really 
suppose — I'm not a resident here myself. 
I'm married and live in Meriden. I've a 
carriage and horse of my own. I enjoy go- 
ing out riding very much. I'm not a resi- 
dent here. I'm just visiting, myself." 

** I hope you'll have better luck than I've 
had if you should happen to let him browse 
on the highway in front of a house when 
you are, as you say, going out riding," said 
Philistina, suavely, pulling up Esau with a 
jerk that really set him going, though as a 
matter of history he went with his mouth 
full of the disputed grass. One would like 
to know more about this economical soul ; 
it would not be uninteresting to trace her 
future career, which if thrift insures suc- 
cess will be high up in the millionaires. 



The white and dusty road begins to be 
dotted at near intervals with Httle white 
houses, the yards grow smaller, and the 
number of children playing before the doors 
increase. The highway has become a street. 
These httle houses are not pretty, but they 
are cheerful and neat, and the plot in front 
is generally crowded with flowers — grown 
together with no sort of eye to color or ar- 
rangement, but in hearty luxuriance. The 
similarity of the houses tells that New 
Hartford is a manufacturing village, and 
these are the homes of the hands, though 
now and then a more ambitious one, 
with towers and colored paint, points to 
what joys the ordinary workman may at- 
tain who becomes a manager or a fore- 
man. 

Philistina pretended to smile at the am- 
bitious colored shingles and the mediaeval 
towers of wood painted pink and yellow 
as unheard - of atrocities, but D. reproved 
her sharply with the reminder that not a 
dozen years ago she thought them the su- 
preme architectural expression of beauty; 
for good taste is not as instinctive as we 
would like to think it, and, unlike the king- 



124 



dom of Heaven, comes by observation and 
not by spiritual gift. 

Among our pale-faced country people 
they noted any number of curly-headed, 
dark-eyed children and blowsy, bonnetless 
women, whose strange tongues and cos- 
tumes seemed oddly incongruous in the 
sweet, clean New England village. 

"They have got here then, have they?" 
said Diana, regretfully. Diana's Christian 
charity does not include the Russian Jew. 

The horseback riders had all the feel- 
ing of foreigners themselves, or rather of 
Americans in a foreign city, when they 
rode up to the low white house with the 
green shutters, the only house of entertain- 
ment they saw in the village, and the maids 
and the stable-boys ran out, and the propri- 
etor in the doorway advanced and invited 
them to descend. There was something 
quite old world, too, in his attitude ; a 
deprecating manner in speaking of his 
house. 

" Just an old-fashioned place, you see," he 
said, rubbing his hands. " A country inn, 
but clean beds and a bit of hot supper." 

Philistina in an instant was the repro- 



125 



duction of her English great-grandmother. 
" The rooms will suit us very well, no doubt, 
my good man," she said. " We will sup at 
eight ; home-brewed ale, a gooseberry tart, 
and a couple of juicy cutlets." 

" Didn't he say, ' My lady and 'ot supper,' 
Diana .^" she whispered, as they went up- 
stairs. 

"Nonsense, Philistina; and why should 
you want to think it old England when 
New England is much nicer ?" But we will 
not say that his engaging ways, so unlike 
the supercilious indifference of the hotel 
clerk to whom they were accustomed, did 
him any harm in the eyes of his guests. 

That night they sat in the moonlight on 
the piazza and talked (with a certain con- 
descension to be sure) to their host. He 
said there were several hundred Russian 
Jews in the town, working w^ith an unex- 
ampled industry at the mills. These in- 
dustries are the manufacture of rules and 
of sail-cloth. Perhaps New Hartford has 
the largest sail-cloth manufactory in the 
country. *' Listen," he said, *'to the talk of 
the people as they pass ; you'd never guess 
you were in New England." They came 



126 



slouching by, not quite the independent 
slouch, either, of our American workmen, 
but with a sort of assuming indifference as 
to manners. The women were bareheaded, 
the men in coarse blouses and trousers. 
Diana, who is quick at languages, caught 
Canadian French, Roumanian, Swedish, low 
and high German, Polish, Viennese patois, 
Italian, Yorkshire dialect, the Irish brogue, 
and Russian. 

'* Do they spend their money here ?" D. 
asked. 

Mine host pointed to a large brick church 
with a cross on it that put the small white 
meeting-house to shame. " The Catholics 
built that," he said, ** but I can't say the 
rest of them are members of the Village 
Improvement Society. I heard a Russian 
Jew cursing one of our people here the 
other day because she didn't give him what 
he called good measure for a cent's worth of 
milk. Industrious ? they're infernally in- 
dustrious ; they live on nothing, and they 
can afford to work for nothing. They'll 
drive us out, you may depend !" 

They had not succeeded in driving one 
Yankee out. This was a person who, the 



127 



horseback riders divined, with a supernat- 
ural intelligence, had something to sell; 
though anything further from trade than 
his manner would have been difficult in- 
deed to conceive. He had built a sort of 
platform, raised and railed off, and placed 
in the middle of the square, and lighted it 
with torches soaked in oil. He was a fam- 
ily man, and exhibited with him his wife 
and boy, as testimonials of his respectable 
and domestic character, and, by inference, 
of the trustworthiness of his goods. They 
sat beside him very straight and dignified, 
taking his constant reference to them as 
just tributes to their importance. All the 
boys in the neighborhood gathered around 
the railing and looked at them with un- 
flinching gaze, and a grave and still de- 
light, not unmixed with hopeless envy. The 
fellow would have made his fortune in Con- 
gress talking against time. His voice was 
sonorous and far-reaching. Not a reference 
did he make to the business he was engaged 
in. He quoted poetry, he paid his tribute 
to religion, he declared himself on the tem- 
perance question, home, and "the sweet, 
sweet love of daughter, of sister, and of 



128 



wife," received his passing tribute. Only 
once did he descend to the realm of the 
commonplace, and that occurred when one 
of the impassive Yankee children who had 
guarded against the faintest expression of 
interest on his upturned, freckled face un- 
warily trod on a dog. The dog not being 
bred in the same school of manners where 
emotion betrays ill -breeding, yelped, and 
the orator, with cruel injustice, attacked 
the boy. *' Where were you raised ?'* he de- 
manded in a fine frenzy. " Interrupting a 
public speaker in his oration. Have you 
no home, no mother to teach you better ? 
No mother, boy? Then God help you !" 

They did not stay the oration out, because 
the landlord confided to them that Demos- 
thenes had been in New Hartford before, and 
was selling electric oil, not that he loved the 
seller less, who he assured them was a family 
man, and well worth patronizing, but what 
did they want with patent medicines ? 

*' The horses are all right, of course," said 
Philistina, taking her candle. The very act 
increased the illusion of foreign parts, and she 
made it as a statement, not an interrogation. 

"Oh, right enough," said D., jauntily. 




XII 

^ I ANA, the innkeeper has just 
come into the dining-room, 
and given me such a turn I 
really don't know how I shall 
ever bear it." 
*' When you are excited like that, Philis- 
tina," said Diana, coldly, " you are incapa- 
ble of conveying information. How many 
times has Miss Anthony urged us, when we 
are agitated, to count twenty, and then say 
exactly what we mean !" 

" Oh, very well," said Philistina, " if you 
don't care to know — " 

" Good gracious ! tell me this instant. 
Was it anything about my trunk not meeting 
me here as we had arranged ? Why, I had 
my best hat in it to wear in Lenox, Sunday ; 
the one with the feathers, you know — that 
nice English shape that comes down a little 
over the forehead, but turns up in the back. 
Did he say it was lost, or hadn't come, or 
what? For Heaven's sake, Philistina, tell 

9 



I30 



me what he said ; if there is anything wom- 
en ought to cultivate, it's clearness and defi- 
niteness and despatch. Why on earth don't 
you tell whether it's my trunk, and what 
did he think I'd better do ? Oh, dear, that 
particular hat ! What did he say — now ? his 
exact words ? You know I can't go down 
now with my front hair all in a state like 
this, and the iron hot." 

*' He said," said Philistina, slowly and de- 
liberately, " Please, my lady — " 

'* Nonsense," said Diana ; " tell me at once. 
Philistina, I do hope you're not going to 
try to be humorous. You know Lady Henry 
Somerset considers humor the very next 
thing to coarseness. What did he say about 
my trunk, and don't keep anything from me 
in a false notion of pity." 

" He said Esau's back had two little lumps 
on it just at the end of the backbone," said 
Philistina, *' and he thinks it's going to rise 
and have to be lanced, and we'd better sell 
him at once on the road." 

" Sell him, indeed !" cried Diana ; " that's 
exactly like all the rest of them, trying to 
impose on us because we are two lone 
women. But really, Philistina, you ought 



not to be so sensational ; why, you made me 
think something dreadful had happened, 
ril be down there the minute I get this curl 
turned." 

*' But, you know, we aren't exactly two 
lone women," persisted Philistina ; " there's 
D." 

''A stable-man can make any other man 
think anything he wants to have him 
think," said Diana, '' but don't be argument- 
ative, Philistina ; you know that's the way 
with women who do the most harm to the 
Cause. I'll be there the very minute I get 
this front hair " — but D.'s voice calling sent 
Philistina away, so that she divined rather 
than heard the completion of the sentence. 

She found Esau munching a wisp of hay. 
There were a great many people about him, 
and all were giving advice. He alone, the 
victim and the hero, like the Duke of Ar- 
gyle on the scaffold, was indifferent, %nd 
even careless of the end, looking around 
with an untroubled gaze into eyes that were 
full of grief. The hostler, a lively Irishman, 
was, I fear, of a double nature. He wanted 
to please everybody, and when the livery- 
stable-keeper — a tall, gray New-Englander, 



132 



with a soothing voice — made hopeless prog- 
nostications as to the condition of the back, 
he agreed in voluminous speech, but by a 
large, taciturn wink, communicated the in- 
formation that the boss was coming it over 
them, and the horse would be fit enough 
with careful riding and a proper rubbing 
down at night. 

** There is very little the matter," an- 
nounced Diana, when she appeared, '' but 
it is just as well to give him six of No. 7. 
Three for a man — and I suppose we might 
double the dose without danger to a horse.'* 

I take pleasure in recording that six of 
No. 7 did not prove too large a dose. Esau 
ate them cheerfully out of Philistina's hand, 
and was none the worse. 

" I hope you'll make New Boston by 
night," said the livery-stable-man. "But, 
in my opinion, the little un's done for." 

'Mie ladies mounted the horses with scant 
leave-taking, but D. dropped behind. 

''You've been paying that hostler, haven't 
you, D. ?" asked Philistina. " He's such a 
nice, sensible fellow. Did you see him wink 
so as to tell us not to believe that disagree- 
able livery-man ?" 



133 



" Yes — ah — I saw him, and I handed him, 
well — a half-dollar ; poor fellow, that — ah — 
gesture might have cost him his place. And, 
as you say, he struck me as a nice, sensible 
man, though he didn't say anything to com- 
promise himself — indeed, I believe he rather 
agreed with his master, but he did — ah — 
communicate his distrust in the way you 
mention." 

Ah, well-a-day, only last Sunday D. was 
laughing at the man who found all his fel- 
low-beings intelligent and trustworthy, who 
divining his opinions agreed with them. 

It was a lovely morning, cool and crisp — 
at least, yet a while, and they followed the 
Farmington River up hill and down till they 
again entered a deep wood which was so 
high above the stream that one looked 
down upon it from a precipice, but a preci- 
pice whose steep sides were hidden with 
golden-rod and purple-topped iron-weed, 
and lady's-slipper springing up in the hol- 
lows. Close to the road velvety willows 
waved, and below their airy tops was a vista 
of trees, arching above the river-bank ; the 
glimpses of sky they caught through the 
overlapping tree -tops showed it an un- 



clouded blue, and Philistina bethought her 
that it looked like a Thursday sky, as it 
was — a mid-week, washed and ironed sky, 
on which the most conscientious of New- 
Englanders might take a well-earned re- 
pose. 

Pleasant Valley lies between New Hart- 
ford and Riverton ; it is a charming coun- 
try, more like one long street than a succes- 
sion of farms. The houses are built close 
to the road, with dooryard evergreens that 
hold them in close shade all the year, and 
great barns that also show their broad, low 
gables to the road, and make the houses 
look small and insignificant. It was at River- 
ton they decided to stop till the heat of the 
day was over; I do not know how far this 
little town is from the railroad, but it looks 
remote from stores and traffic. A hand- 
some iron bridge spans the Farmington, 
and then there is a long, wide street, inter- 
sected by another street bordered by elms, 
and another pretty bridge to cross ere you 
come to the Riverton House, where man and 
beast are accommodated. 

Philistina could scarcely wait for Esau's 
saddle to be removed, so eager was she to 



I3S 



discover whether the double dose of No. 7 
had been injurious, and even Diana looked 
a trifle nervous ; but there was no accel- 
eration of the size of the lumps, and he 
was soon eating his four quarts of oats 
like a first-born who had never been phys- 
icked nor lost his birthright. 

The day at Riverton was full of a sunny 
tranquillity, which, somehow or other, gave 
Philistina a heartache, and yet it was not 
a heartache she wished away. They sat 
for a while in the parlor of the inn, a low- 
ceiled room with stiff furniture, which, 
while it was not old enough to make them 
covetous, had a quaint character of its own, 
and watched the people pass on infrequent 
journeys up the street to the drug-store and 
the General Commission. Opening on the 
parlor is a large and cheerful room, where 
presently they were sumptuously to dine ; 
somehow, it had the look of a ball-room, 
and there were other hospitable apart- 
ments built in a rambling way all abftut 
the corner lot the inn occupies, that sug- 
gest by -gone gayety when my lady passed 
through with her coach and four, and the 
lawyers stopped for the night on their way 



136 



to Hartford, and the great stages with their 
load of merchants tarried with the goods 
and the news, bringing the latest word from 
Boston. 

Their hostess, however, could weave them 
no romances of the past. She was a new- 
comer from quite a different neighborhood, 
which the riders were surprised to find 
was, after all, only three miles off, but she 
counted herself, and was quite submissive 
to be counted, a stranger. One must live in 
a New England village at least a century 
to arrogate to one's self any familiar airs. 

She told them there were two versions 
of the legend of the Barkhamsted Light- 
house, an inland warning to seafarers, that 
often puzzled the travellers. One was that 
the Indians always kept a light burning 
there of a dark night to induce travellers 
to alight, that they might fall upon them 
and rob them. Another was of a softer 
nature. A certain old woman, with an un- 
canny reputation and three pretty daugh- 
ters, nightly lit the far-reaching torch which 
guided the maiden's lovers through circui- 
tous ways from the valley below to the hut 
on the hill. 



^37 



When they were cooled and rested they 
went down into the village, stopping to lean 
over the pretty bridge and look at the gold- 
colored water running in a rapid stream be- 
neath. There is a factory on the other side, 
and a Canadian Frenchman with oblique 
eyes and swarthy complexion told them 
with bitterness, as if his fair province had 
been usurped, that the Russian Jew was 
ousting all the respectable working people 
out of Riverton. '' Ces sceleratsF' he said, 
with his Gallic shrug, and Philistina pri- 
vately thought the shrug and the French 
were just as incongruous in the dear Puri- 
tan town as the jargon (we instinctively call 
all the languages we don't understand jar- 
gon) of the Russian Hebrew. 

D. does not like graveyards, nor funerals, 
except the gay Irish funerals which some- 
how reconcile one to the inevitable by their 
common -sense cheerfulness in view of so 
commonplace a thing as death ; but the Riv- 
erton graveyard, at least, that in which the 
pretty stone church is set, is really quite a 
cheery little spot, and Diana and Philistina 
had little trouble in coaxing him over to sit 
on the fallen slabs and smell the sweet gar- 



138 



den flowers that were blooming all about. 
The church is disfigured by a Grecian tem- 
ple that surmounts its solid stone architect- 
ure ; but for this decoration it would be 
an aesthetic object to the most heterodox of 
observers ; but D. said that temple was as 
much a sign of orthodoxy on a New Eng- 
land Congregational meeting-house, of a 
certain period, as a cross of the Catholic 
belief. There are inanimate things, you 
know, that are not of themselves inherently 
good or bad, or religious or heretical, but 
association has made them so. The Greek 
temple on top of the meeting-house meant 
sound doctrine. 

" But where are all the people ?" queried 
Philistina. 

"The women in Riverton," said D., "are 
doubtless at their legitimate tasks: keeping 
their houses." 

"And the men," said Diana, scornfully, 
" are at theirs : at the tavern or the store 
drinking beer and talking politics." 

Philistina, who by this time had learned 
both to run with the hare and hunt with 
the hounds, contented herself with saying 
there was something indecorous almost in 



the people across the way playing tennis in 
an old garden. Tennis in Riverton looked 
somehow as if an old woman had arrayed 
herself in a too-too youthful gown. 

There were several tombs whose inscrip- 
tions they deciphered, but one they united in 
finding unique. A wife of many years* dis- 
cipline is commemorated by her husband 
in these words, after birth and marriage are 
mentioned : 

''And on the of , 1801, 

Her spirit, it is charitably hoped, 
Took its flight 
To fairer realms above." 

*' This is the only candid inscription on a 
tomb I have ever read," said D. " The wom- 
an was a virago or a blue -stocking, or a 
poor cook, and all the husband could say 
for her was he hoped she had gone to a 
better place. I'm glad he lived thirty years 
after her. And the evidence is strong that 
he was satisfied with his attempt at matri- 
mony and in no temper to risk it again, for 
you see there was no tomb to a second wife. 
There is no such proof of a man's happiness 
with his first wife as his willingness to un- 
dertake another." 



I40 



*' There is something more pitiful even 
than the lack of appreciation of this hus- 
band," said Diana, with flashing eye. *' All 
these inscriptions under which women lie 
refer to their relation with the other sex : 
* A dutiful spouse,' 'An affectionate mother 
to loving sons,' ' Her brother's joy,' * She 
shall do him good and not evil all the 
days of her life,' * Her husband also, and he 
praiseth her.' Now don't you suppose these 
women had any personality outside their 
care for the men of their households, and 
would like to be remembered because they 
were wise, or prudent, or sensible as men 
are remembered.?" 

" My dear Diana," said D., " when these 
people lived and died they were under the 
Jewish dispensation. The Puritan woman 
was an Oriental in her attitude towards 
men. We have done away with the Jew- 
ish Sabbath, and we shall do away — I 
think, indeed, we have already done away — 
with the Jewish view of woman ; let us 
hope we have come into the Christian era 
at last." 

His sweet reasonableness had its effect, 
and all three strolled about the sunny graves 



with a feeling of good-fellowship as if they 
had at last got on common ground. 

" I wonder why it does not frighten one,'* 
said Philistina, at last : " the inevitableness 
of their fate being one's own, and that some 
day this awful thing must happen to you 
and to me." 

*' It does not frighten you," said D., "be- 
cause it is going to happen to me and to 
Diana and to every other living creature, 
but not to you. Everybody makes himself 
the exception, and this, and this alone, is 
why you are not afraid. But come, we must 
away." 

At 4 P.M. they cantered out of Riverton. 




XIII 

)HE Farmington River rippled 
and burned and gleamed in 
the sun — burned a trifle too 
fiercely to suit the horseback 
^^ riders as they rode along its 
banks to New Boston. And presently the 
sun set, and all the nearer sky looked like a 
sort of blushing foam that extended into 
waves of light and shade. Near the edges 
of the farther clouds were monoliths and 
columns of coral that stood out straight 
and fine, and back of all was a far-reaching 
mystery of blue. 

But it was a far cry to their destination, 
and it seemed, at least to Philistina and 
Diana, as if New Boston was as distant as 
the New Jerusalem. By seven o'clock — 
this was August 5th — they began to ask peo- 
ple how far it was, and to have positive likes 
and dislikes for them as their replies went. 
If a person said New Boston was still far 
off, he was at once set down as an objec- 



143 



tionable individual. If the distance was 
shortened, the reply gave the answerer a 
good place in the riders' affections. The 
first woman, a kindly soul, heard them, when 
they got to Coldbrook and stopped in front 
of her house, trying to get some informa- 
tion out of her son, whose intelligence 
spoke badly for heredity somewhere. But 
the riders soon discovered that the fault 
did not come from the maternal side, for 
the mother came bustling down full of in- 
terest and information. She was dressing 
for a church sociable, which term, to ears 
accustomed to *' meetings of the Young Peo- 
ple's Christian Endeavor Society," seemed 
oddly homely, but she didn't mind a mite 
coming down just this way — if they didn't. 
As to telling them the way, she guessed 
she'd do it better'n Jim. Jim was the most 
dependable body to get to a place that ever 
was, but he couldn't tell how he got there. 
He went to New Boston every week, but as 
to showing you, 'less he went along, he 
couldn't do it. 'Twas the way with a lot 
of good people, good they were, and every- 
body knew it, but they couldn't give any 
sort of experience if 'twas in heaven itself, 



and they'd be asked. All they could say'd 
be, there they was. 

'* And that would be all they'd need say, 
I am sure," said Philistina, sympathetically. 
The boy didn't look so stupid after that, 
for there is innocence and there is dulness, 
and they are two different things. 

" How far is it ?" questioned D., when she 
had given her clear testimony for the river 
instead of the hill road. 

*' Well, two miles and a half," she replied, 
with an attitude of sorrow that she could 
not conscientiously make it less. 

" Only two miles and a half .^" exclaimed 
Philistina ; '' what a nice, sensible soul ! I 
almost love her." 

But when they had ridden a half- hour 
longer, and the next person called out " two 
miles and a half — a good half, too," both of 
the ladies broke out in vindictive language. 
" I never saw a ruder, more disagreeable 
man." And so on till they reached New 
Boston in the dim twilight. They hated the 
people who said it was far, and loved those 
who decreased the distance, not in the least 
regarding whether they spoke the truth or 
not. 



145 



The inn at New Boston resolved itself 
that night in a dim memory of a dark sta- 
ble, where each man unsaddled his own 
beast, and a long, low dining-room, where 
they ate hot steak and fried potatoes, and 
were thankful. It was exactly the dish they 
would have ordered had they been at Del- 
monico's, because when there are three 
Americans, beefsteak and potatoes are what 
is always agreed upon. And yet they did 
not feel like diners at Delmonico's when they 
went to their well -served meal, presided 
over by a lady with kind eyes and gray 
hair who rejoiced hospitably in their being 
hearty. There are places I recall in Paris 
and Vienna where the shabby waiter in the 
worn dress -suit wishes one '' bon appetif' 
with a show of effusion, but we are conscious 
that one must pay in sous or even francs 
for that shallow compliment, and the '* bon 
appetW is not so genial before a table 
d'hote dinner as one served a la carte. 

They found next morning that the reason 
New Boston was so near and yet so far the 
night before was because it is irregularly 
built, and the red lights of its houses dodge 
in and out of view while it is miles away. 



146 



The best house and the church are well set 
up here, but the shops, or rather stores, are 
in the valley, and New Boston is so coun- 
try-like and so childless that all the way 
down from the hill to the town were black- 
berry-vines covered with untouched fruit. 
I said childless with a sort of sigh, for the 
two pretty little girls who ran about the inn 
proclaimed themselves proudly from Meri- 
den, and their companion, a boy in his after- 
noon clean shirt and face, was from Suffield. 

" There's only four other children we 
know who live here," said the eldest little 
girl, " and that's one of them ;" and she 
pointed to a little girl who was going by. 
She looked indeed a country girl in her 
blue stuff gown made long, and sewed 
stoutly onto the waist. A real sun-bonnet 
covered her head. '* She's taking black- 
berries to some old people who live in that 
big house. She has to work, but, oh ! she's 
a splendid player when she does play." 

" Yes, she's a splendid player," the chil- 
dren echoed. 

" Henny, Henny, come play!" 

But Henny turned her sturdy little legs 
neither to the right nor the left. " Soon es 



147 



I do my chores," she answered back, and 
plodded on her busy way. The children 
hung around and waited aimlessly. The 
grown people concluded Henny hadn't a 
bad sort of time, after all. 

Diana and Philistina thought they had 
never seen such a stylish young man as the 
one who overlooked them — he called him- 
self a clerk — at one of the stores. He might 
as well as not have come out of a Hebrew 
clothing-store in the Bowery. He wore a 
thick bang and an air of insolent ease that 
ought to have put him in the first four of 
the Four Hundred. Having nothing which 
they asked for in stock, they advised with 
him as to the possibilities of the other 
stores, and then he added to his slender 
vocabulary: " He knew nothing about New 
Boston nor the people — 'twa'n't in his line." 

Dear, dear, what was his line.^ The part 
of Hamlet, with all stars in the company, 
or that greater social height, the head-waiter 
at Delmonico's ? 

Down in the village they saw nothing so 
interesting as this enchanted prince, except 
a girl with a pretty straw-hat on carrying a 
glass of jelly across the street ; the waiter 



148 



was covered with a napkin, and a sprig of 
sweet verbena lay on one side. The glass 
was long and narrow, and of that delicious 
shape they thought were all smashed the 
day their grandmothers were buried. 

** Diana," said Philistina, **did you know 
anybody ever sent jelly to sick people now- 
adays ?" 

" Say ill, Philistina," said Diana ; " we are 
not at sea." And then she burst out with : 
** The dear old thing ! I'd almost be willing 
to be sick to have it brought me, neighbor- 
like, as that is, only it is wicked, you know, 
to be ill." 

The drive they presently took, by the 
courtesy of a Hartford friend, was along the 
river-bank ; but the river's course was broken 
by huge rocks and .fallen logs, so that it 
poured in white cascades into gold-colored 
pools. On the opposite side was a deep 
wood of varied greens. The near road-side 
was also thick -set with green growths: 
thickets of blackberry bushes, with pennon- 
like tops, purple thistle, woodbine, flinging 
itself over rocks and bushes with an abandoii 
that bespoke a more torrid home than its 
present temperate one ; thoroughwort, at 



149 



which D. trembled. ** They used to give it 
to me in the spring," he said, '* brewed in 
a strong tea, against sickness. The better 
I was, more surely had I to take it to keep 
well." I only tell the common names of 
the plants, and that in some confusion — 
there were knitted banks of golden-rod and 
sumach, and the "false" buckwheat scram- 
bling on top. D. looked vainly for blue 
gentians, finding only one, but saw rabbit's- 
foot, and May- weed, shepherd 's-purse, and 
white clover, and civis, and greenbrier fill- 
ing in the chinks, and wild -grape vines so 
cunningly intertwined in the thicket that 
they were constantly calling out at the 
monstrosity of its bearing mulberries and 
kindred fruits. 

It gave them a pang to see four comfort- 
able houses in succession, two with good 
gardens, where vegetables and grain were 
growing, and fruit -yards with apple-trees 
groaning under their load of fruit, the doors 
and windows nailed up, the place deserted. 

** Folks gone West," said the driver, la- 
conically. 

" But it's a terrible life out West," said D. ; 
" those great distances between the farms, 



150 



the cruel winters, the hot summers. Here 
they have excellent schools, church privi- 
leges, a free library, really cultivated society 
in its best sense, and these pleasant places 
where comparatively they have none of the 
discomforts of the West." 

" What does your worship know of farm- 
ing anywhere ?" ventured Philistina. 

** Know !" said D. " Why, I knew about 
farming from my birth till my tenth year. 
Do you suppose a man ever forgets any- 
thing he learned then ?" 

" Some places seem to have done their 
work," said the driver, in defence of the 
emigrants ; *' a new house would look smart 
and perky in this old village, and you see 
the young people's passin* off. There's very 
few children in New Boston. And when 
you've worked a horse all its measure of 
days it ought to rest. Our grandsires worked 
this land, and our fathers worked it, and we 
worked it. It seems to me it's earned a spell 
from our children." 

" It IS melancholy, D.," said Philistina, 
as they went in the stable to saddle their 
horses ; they never met a liveryman who 
could do it, which shows they are not used 



151 



to women's riding horseback in New Eng- 
land, 

** Yes ; but I envy their gift of quiet," said 
D., looking at the long silent stretch of 
granite walls, the flower- crowned meadows, 
the still white houses, every blind shut, the 
little silent dogs that pass through the 
lanes. The old men were sitting in their 
shirt-sleeves before the kitchen doors read- 
ing the last month's Agriculturist, or mak- 
ing a feint of reading, for they were fast 
asleep. 

'' But not enough to want to go back to 
it, I hope," said Philistina. 

*' No, no," said D., hastily; "we can't go 
back. Even were one well -beloved risen 
from the grave, he might well hover out- 
side his own threshold, doubting his wel- 
come." 

The road to New Marlborough leads over 
high hill crests, from which there are ever- 
changing views, wide sweeps to the south 
horizon, outcropping granite ridges and 
bowlders, then a dip into deep woods, and 
a farewell to a pretty little stream by which 
they rode two or three miles, silver rushes 
of water over moss-covered logs, deep silent 



152 



pools, bounded on either side with thick 
undergrowths of flowers- and ferns, and 
straggling vines that put out long arms to 
ensnare the travellers and hold them pris- 
oners in the magic wood. And there was a 
bridge under which the water shone like a 
burnished shield, and a long narrow lane, 
where there were creamy elder bushes, and 
amber woodbine turned into rubies, and 
thorn-trees, heavy with coral beads — they 
might have been jewels, had the riders only 
stopped to look. And, as they mounted 
the hill, tall scarlet cardinal-flowers nodded 
a welcome, and the fences were covered 
with wild grape, that gave out a sweet, 
sensuous odor. In the warm, enervating 
air it was hard to believe this was New 
England, home of sturdy faiths and grim 
convictions. " If it lasted much longer," 
said D., musingly, "this riotous summer, 
one can fancy our sons and daughters very 
like the sons and daughters Horace dwelt 
among, though for that matter the climate 
of Italy has changed since his day if there 
is any truth in his description. Instead of 
vexing ourselves with dogmas and creeds, 
we would be listeners, pillowed on the green 



153 



turf, to orchard choruses, and as the poet 
has it : 

" ' Ludit herboso pecus omne campo, 
Festus in pratus vacat otioso, 
Cum bove pagus.' 

" Does my lady perfect herself in the mod- 
ern rather than the ancient tongues ? 

** * In the long grass the herds and flocks shall sport upon 
the lea, 
And man and beast in idleness the livelong day shall 
be.'" 

" But that's about December, D.," cried 
Diana, " and you've left out a line." 

" His December corresponded with our 
August," said D., curtly, and falling back to 
ride with Philistina, who had accustomed 
herself to ride with Esau for company. 

Sandersfield is a melancholy township, 
though it is pleasantly placed. Only two 
families spent last winter in the centre. 
Somebody told them that in '70 it contained 
700 souls. But I do not know a more lovely 
view than that from the height of the pla- 
teau. A wide, treeless plain, with patches 
of fire-weed glowing in the midst of the 
green, clumps of scant " painter's brush " 



154 



gleaming like red torches in the grass ; the 
natural slope in the valley, with belts and 
bars and flickering spaces of dark shadows 
playing over it. Then a stretch of forest, 
and then the Berkshire Hills resting low in 
the distance and not defining the horizon, 
so that one has a sense of space and a sense 
of solitude. 

As they rode along the desolate, deserted 
country, a voice startled them. 

It was a man in a cabbage-patch, digging 
diligently ; but he got up and ran into the 
road. 

" Having a good time }" he called out, 
cheerily. Bless the fellow for his divine 
gift of sympathy; he didn't seem to be 
having a good time, working in that lone- 
some field ; but he wanted us to be hav- 
ing it. 

The sight of his forlorn figure and kind 
smile made them as melancholy as that of 
the fine old deserted house they reached 
within a mile or two of New Marlborough. 
It was a true colonial mansion : wide hall 
through the centre, a lovely porch with a 
pointed arch and little fluted columns, 
which were as dainty and as graceful as 



155 



the church -spire in Farmington, and, if 
there is any justice in this world, ought to 
bring tears to the eyes of the author of 
Daisy Miller, since those eyes were un- 
able to look at a jug of beer and a loaf of 
bread painted by the younger Teniers with- 
out a burst of unmanly emotion. 

"There is nothing," said D., *'so helpless 
looking as a deserted house." 

*' Except," said Diana, sagely, " an empty 
mind." 

That quotation from Horace had put 
Diana in a good-humor with herself. 

" But a mind may well be empty of self- 
ishness and egotism, and many another 
evil," said D. ** There are very few whole 
truths ; most of them have to be modified." 

*' Oh," said Philistina, " if you're going to 
quote old truisms and try to pass them off 
as original conclusions, I shall ride ahead." 

Ahead meant New Marlborough. Why 
new.^ It is a very, very old town, and not 
the most literal of Anglo - Saxon tourists 
could take it as a plagiarism of the Marl- 
borough across the water ; not that it is not 
the prettiest of villages, with its green, its 
church-spire, and its colonial houses. 



iS6 



The horseback people slept well. The 
next morning, booted and spurred, they 
sought the stables. 

Esau's back had two humps on it as large 
as hens' eggs. 

Diana and D. were for the first time 
united since their literary spat, and they 
travestied the immortal saying of the two 
great English leaders during the Franco- 
Prussian war. *' Warm as are our sympa- 
thies with Germany," said Disraeli and the 
Grand Old Man, '* let us weep together over 
poor France." 

*' Let us weep together," said these two, 
sorrowfully, *' over poor Esau." 



XIV 




I HE fate of Esau hung in the 
balance two days. By night 
it was reported in the stables 
that he was a very sick horse. 
The next day that he had fall- 
en lame ; that afternoon he had turned his 
face to the wall like Elizabeth in the play. 
D. went out with the stable - man who was 
attending him, and when he came back his 
countenance was lightened. 

'* I've sold him," he said, with an air of 
having accomplished a great feat. 

*' Who to, D. ?'* queried Philistina, who 
didn't mind grammar when she wanted in- 
formation. 

"Oh, to the stable-man," said D., in an 
indifferent manner. '* He says he's taking a 
risk, but he's willing to." 

Diana and Philistina exchanged glances. 

"How much did you get.^" said the latter. 

" You don't expect a man to sell a dying 

horse for a mine of money, do you ?" replied 



158 



D., impatiently. " Come, Philistina, get into 
the carriage, and let the hotel proprietor 
drive you over to Stockbridge ; we'll ride." 

"Oh, D.," cried Philistina, "he's cheated 
you ; I know he has, and it's too bad ! If you 
only were clever about things like some 
people—" 

" Philistina," said D., "I have long based 
my opposition to equal rights on the fact 
that women are not essentially honest. You 
know perfectly well in a horse trade one 
party has got to do the other party, and you 
are regretting in the liveliest of terms that 
I didn't do that hostler instead of his doing 
me. You'd be just the same in any political 
matter or any legal matter. You'd be like 
Sir Arthur Helps's old woman, who expected 
her shilling to buy twice as much as other 
people's shillings because it was hers. What 
you wanted would in your eyes be right, and 
you'd wink at the immorality if you discov- 
ered any, because you couldn't believe any- 
thing that could benefit the side you had 
taken could be very bad." 

" Nonsense," said Philistina, " pecuniary 
honesty is peculiar to women, though I 
agree with M. Renan : it is the most hour- 



159 



geois of all the virtues, and one supposed to 
require the least self-repression. Besides, if 
somebody has to be done in a horse trade, 
why let that stable-man take the sin on his 
conscience ? You look much more able to 
bear it." 

"It is queer," said D., taking no notice, 
"that association with so noble an animal 
as the horse seems to affect the character of 
men to their detriment. You would think 
that such an animal would be excellent com- 
pany ; but it is not true. Liverymen, stable- 
men, jockeys — they are all of a sort. They 
look you in the face and sweetly lie you out 
of your choicest steed. After this journey 
I have done with horses. I have found my 
temptation, thank Heaven, in time !" 

In almost any other period of American 
history it would seem a pity to end this 
record of a journey in humiliation instead 
of triumph. Twenty years ago, perhaps, the 
most conscientious of Philistinas would 
have been pardoned if she had, like the sun, 
gone down in the golden glow of a recov- 
ered Esau, herself a sort of a lady centaur 
on his back, loping in perfect harmony 
together over the Berkshire hills. But 



i6o 



the spirit of the age demands not only that 
this record be faithful to the eternal verities, 
but that it be as pessimistic a piece of lit- 
erature as the sad, sad public loves. Phil- 
istina was too conscious of that exacting 
audience to let her saddle experiences ter- 
minate in commonplace success and good- 
cheer. She did not, it is true, carry the 
doctrine of destructiveness so far as to 
subject herself to a last interview with 
Esau ; but the calm stoicism with which 
she changed her riding-habit for a blue 
flannel skirt and blouse waist, a costume 
which was repeated with some uniformity 
by other travellers last summer, and turned 
her face in another manner of journeying 
towards Stockbridge, was not without its 
pathetic aspect. This simple submission to 
the whirlwind of fate, and acquiescence in 
the settled belief that men are merely atoms 
blown in its path, evinced an acquaintance 
with modern fiction that spoke well for her 
stern determination to read novels, not for 
their plot, but their moral lesson. 

Diana and D., for a time at least, went on 
without her ; and if she was haunted with a 
vision of Esau prancing out of the stable 



i6i 



with his altruistic purchaser on his back as 
soon as she had got well out of New Marl- 
borough, let us hope she was willing to let 
her experience prove that life is very sad 
and very disappointing, and it becomes us 
to verify the assertions of the greatest liv- 
ing authors — that nothing is really worth 
while. 



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